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Building professional identities of student teachers at the beginning of their vocational education and professional training provides opportunities to explore diversity of practice and provide external support. In the available literature, there is only a small number of studies that explore the professional identity of pre-service and student teachers. The main problem of this research is to examine self-reported attitudes toward student teachers' professional identity dimensions. The second aim of the presented study was examining the reliability and concurrent validity of the Student Teachers Professional Identity Scale (Fisherman & Abbot, 1998), which was used for the first time in Serbia. The initial sample of respondents consisted of 158 students from the Faculty of Pedagogical Sciences. Results indicate that university students perceive teaching roles more as a specific job and not as a profession. They are goal-directed towards their job as teachers and perceive their practice as a part of their studies and not as a result of their professional identity development as teachers. The mentioned scale (for one-factor solution with the satisfactory criterion of confirmatory factor analysis) obtained very good reliability (α = .935) and concurrent validity indicators and values. Researching professional identity at early career stages can help educators to emphasize the multidimensionality and complexity of the teaching profession.

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Lessing’s short novel The Memoirs of a Survivor encapsulates all the dominant narrative, political, and philosophical preoccupations of its prolific author. Straddling the genres of socio-realistic dystopia and post-apocalyptic fantasy, it self-consciously reflects on many questions relevant to contemporary readers. Drawing on the main premises of postmodern poetics, particularly on its ontological concerns, and on more recent theories about new ‘critical dystopias’ in literature, this article points to the multi-layered utopian aspects present at different levels of the text. Moreover, applying philosophical and sociological concepts of Jean Baudrillard to the interpretation of Lessing’s symbolic and narrative strategies, such as his notion of the alienation of death in capitalist society, the article shows how this novel can be read not only as a critique of materialist culture and a study of deprivation and isolation with serious psychological and civilizational consequences, but also as a hopeful play with ontological borders implied in the imaginative rethinking of our private and shared realities.

Although there is no uniquely accepted definition, procrastination is usually defined as willing, irrational delay of planned activities, despite the knowledge that it will have negative consequences for an individual. Self-handicapping, as a strategy for coping with potential failure, occurs when there is a threat of self-esteem, that is, when a failure in an activity most commonly associated with ability is expected. The individual then actively seeks or creates factors that impede the performance of that activity, which can serve as justification for a potential failure. The aim of the research was to determine the connection between academic procrastination and student self-handicapping. In addition, a sample of one hundred ninety-eight students of the Faculty of Education (N = 158) was used to examine the factor structure of the instruments used (Procrastination Scale (Tuckman 1991), Self-handicapping Scale (Jones, Rhodewalt 1982), concurrent and discriminative validity of the scales, as well as predictive and classification values of the model in standard and hierarhical regression analysis (gender, study level, procrastination, self-handicapping, self-esteem, resilience, imposterism, burnout, self-directed learning). The results show that 54% of students procrastinate; that procrastination is explained by one dimension and self-handicapping by two (behavioral and proclaimed self-handicap); that the correlation of procrastination with behavioral self-handicapping is statistically significant (r = 0.64), and that the association of procrastination with claiming self-handicapping is not statistically significant (r = 0.10); that female respondents procrastinate more than male subjects; that weaker procrastinators self-handicap themselves differently (behavioral-claimed) while stronger procrastinators self-handicap themselves similarly; that based on standardized (β) beta coefficients in the regression analysis, it can be concluded that the strongest predictors of procrastination are gender and claimed self-handicapping. These data point to a relatively large number of those who are delaying their academic responsibilities, hence academic procrastination is a problem of epidemiological proportions among college students.