Professional identity formation (PIF) is an integral part of educating professionals. A well-formed professional identity helps individuals to develop a meaningful professional self-understanding that facilitates their transition to and sustainability in professional work. Although professional identity and its formation are well theorized, it is…

Background: Mentoring is an important developmental relationship that can positively impact student growth, specifically, students' capacity to make sense of their own selves through addressing any possible incongruence between their social identities and emerging professional identity as engineers. This need is even more pronounced for students…

The importance of reflective pedagogy is widely acknowledged in HE and is a cornerstone of the helping professions curricula, enhancing students' self-awareness and reflective skills. The literature emphasizes the virtues of reflection for the students' personal and professional growth but insufficiently addresses the emotional pain entailed. To…

Although reflection is recognized as a driving force for teachers' professional development, which is the reason for its incorporation into Initial Teacher Education (ITE), there is still little clarity about its effects on teachers' professional development. This article seeks to understand the Social Representations (SR) of tutors and…

The progress of education in our country is still constrained by the low status of teaching. The comprehension and growth of university students' stages of professional identity creation are not well researched. This issue is now recognized on both a theoretical and practical level. This research aimed to examine the effectiveness of providing…

Placement as a form of work-integrated learning is a valued element of undergraduate education. Prior work explores how placement provides a site for developing professional values, skills and competences as well as identifying how students build awareness of professional requirements. Greater focus on how such processes of awareness are realised,…

The needs of contemporary doctoral scholar-practitionership are placing demands on institutions of higher education to assess the methods by which curriculum and faculty resources are invested in student development. As students continue, often, to remain in practice during doctoral studies, the need to develop and assume an identity as a…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) has become an increasingly common feature of higher education curricula. Two aspects of WIL, authenticity and consistency, are valued in different ways by the stakeholders involved. Authenticity, by its very nature, supports the idea of learning being personalized and unique. Consistency, on the other hand, is…

The lack of support in academia, especially during doctoral studies, is a widely debated issue. Such experiences can be expected to be highly relevant to young researchers for their developing identity as scholars and their career aspirations. According to self-determination theory, support for the three basic psychological needs for competence,…

This paper explores methodological questions in the study of identity through an examination and discussion of the empirical papers in this special issue. Particular attention is paid to the ways identity is operationalized in the study of how learning environments foster changes in students' sense of self. The paper concludes that identity is a…

Research suggests that identity development is a crucial dimension of the doctoral student experience. This study explores what identity formations doctoral students exhibit in the doctoral journey and how these formations affect their experiences in the process of achieving a doctorate. The methodology employed was within the qualitative paradigm…

STEM fields, and engineering disciplines in particular, historically have reflected a traditionalist approach to education. For pre-professional students, this context may be highly competitive, and may include an expectation that undergraduates will sink or swim while making their way through a course progression designed to "weed out"…

This article explores and compares the way in which Danish and Kenyan student-teachers achieve a professional identity while training to be teachers, drawing on conceptually-related theoretical approaches of critical psychology, social theory of learning, professional literature and literature about narratives and life history. Findings from…

There is a substantial amount of research pointing to the benefits of pedagogical approaches such as problem-based learning (PBL) and the importance of developing professional identity as a physician in medical education. The aim of this review is to investigate the existing literature concerned with the relation between PBL and professional…

This paper draws upon a wider piece of research aimed at investigating professional identity development in initial teacher education. It is based upon the view of identity as a dynamic and multifaceted process and initial teacher education as a key context for its development. Data reported in this paper are part of a broader project carried out…