Challenging or Conserving your Beliefs: A Person-centered Approach of Pre-service Teachers’ Educational Identity

Emerging adulthood is a challenging period in terms of identity development, especially in the education and career domains. In the present paper we employed a person-centered approach of identity processes to identify pre-service teachers’ educational identity statuses. As beliefs about teaching influence teachers’ engagement in professional development tasks, we explored connections between their beliefs about teaching ability (innate versus learned) and educational identity status. Results indicated that most pre-service teachers in our sample were characterized by identity achievement, followed by searching moratorium, diffusion, and foreclosure. Searching moratorium pre-service teachers scored higher than the foreclosed ones on both teaching ability beliefs.