Academic Identity construction between trajectories and choices

Abstract

Considering the building of the academic identity as a social process, constantly changing, this article departs from the voices of professors from a Portuguese Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, in order to comprehend the (re)construction of their identities in different contexts of their lives. The study is interested in knowing more about life experiences that are previous to the teaching exercise regarding the familiar context, schooling, initial training and other professional experiences. Among different goals, the work seeks to identify how these past experiences may influence the professional exercise and contribute to the subject identity development as a professor. In methodological terms, the investigation developed a focus group with five professors and carried out interviews of biographical type with other four professors from a Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences from Portugal. Data was submitted to content analysis and results were addressed to advance into the interpretation of academic identity. From these results, we privilege in this article the importance and influences of experiences from the familiar context, schooling trajectory, initial training and others referring to times previous to the professional exercise (or their lack) to the construction of academic identity.