Taking a communicative approach in a qualitative inquiry entails including people’s voices through dialogues that are egalitarian and oriented toward transformation. This approach aligns with the transformative paradigm in the pursuit of ensuring the inclusion of the most vulnerable groups. This article explores the role of the communicative approach when conducting a case study in an elementary school to study the impact of dialogic literary gatherings (DLGs) on students’ relationships, particularly for those students most at risk of being marginalized. For that purpose, dialogic encounters with teachers and students occurred in the school to jointly develop the research. During the DLGs, researchers engaged in egalitarian dialogues with the students, and these dialogues facilitated getting to know each other and building relationships of trust. The communicative approach in this study allowed us to establish a profound dialogue with 9-year-old girls to grasp the transformative impact they experienced in their relationships with others. Students’ voices are considered essential in communicative research to provide socially useful results and to measure transformative social impacts beyond the educational establishment.

Resumen:El prestigio social de la profesión docente es un factor que afecta a la configuración de la identidad del docente y a la calidad educativa. Esta investigación tiene como objetivo analizar la percepción que los estudiantes del Grado en Educación Primaria (GEP) y del Máster en Formación del Profesorado de Educación Secundaria (MES) tienen sobre la imagen social del profesor. Han participado en la investigación estudiantes del GEP, 147 de primer curso y 117 de cuarto y estudiantes del MES, 59 en el inicio de los estudios y 52 a su finalización. De ellos, 44 estudiantes respondieron en ambos momentos. La consideración que los estudiantes tienen sobre el prestigio de la profesión evoluciona a lo largo de la formación inicial, siendo cada vez más conscientes de que está infravalorada. Las razones que los estudiantes argumentan para explicar la escasa consideración social del docente giran en torno a tres ideas: insuficiente impacto social, buenas condiciones laborales, sencillez tanto de las tareas y funciones que desempeñan como de los requisitos académicos para conseguir la certificación. Los resultados tienen implicaciones para la formación inicial del profesorado y para la calidad de la educación. Abstract:Teachers’ social prestige is a factor that affects teachers’ identity and quality of education. This research aims to analyze education undergraduate and master students’ perception about the teacher’s social image. Participants in this research were 147 first year and 117 fourth year Undergraduate students in Primary Education, and 59 Master’s students in Secondary Education at the beginning of the course and 52 at the end. Among them, 44 students participated in both moments. Students’ perception about the prestige of the teaching profession develops over the initial teacher training towards a greater awareness of its undervalued status. The reasons provided by the students to explain the low social status of the teacher deal with three main ideas: a) lacking social impact; b) positive working conditions; c) simplicity of teachers’ tasks and responsibilities as well as of the academic requirements for their qualifications. Our results have implications for the initial teacher training as well as for the quality of the education.

Many studies and publications have been devoted to the analysis and development of teacher identity from different points of view, using diverse instruments and methodologies and analyzing different dimensions of identity. Despite the scrutiny, it is still a challenge to understand and define an issue as complex as professional identity. Although there is no clear unanimity on the concept of identity itself, several characteristics have been identified from different approaches. Thus, aspects such as personal unity, stability over time, and across situations and contexts contrast with such features as multiplicity, discontinuity, and a social nature. Faced with this dichotomy, the dialogic perspective explains the complexity of the construct by proposing that the aforementioned features are linked respectively and dialectically. In other words, the various dimensions of identity, along with their variability through time and the influence exerted by social and contextual aspects, are combined with personal unity, with stability over time, and across situations and contexts. This can, occasionally, lead to conflict and contradictions that the individual strives to manage through self-dialogue. Focusing in the dialogic conceptualization, several implications for research are identified. Firstly, it disallows static categorizations of teachers and places the focus on grasping the self-dialogue that allows teachers to maintain a certain degree of stability and coherence in their identity over time. Secondly, it showcases the effect that dialogue and participation-focused research can have on professional development. Additionally, the study of identity in all its complexity and mutability advocates the integrated study of two levels of analysis: On the one hand, there is the position and actions of teachers in different contexts and situations; and, on the other, there is their professional story, past, present and future, along with the sociocultural factors that have impacted it. According to this dialogic approach, both the research on the professional identity and the teacher training should incorporate strategies that promote dialogue on actual performance and on professional careers. To this effect, longitudinal designs help capture the dialogue between stability and change. Still, transversal studies can be undeniably useful to identify current conflicts that might arise between personal and professional roles, as well as how such conflicts are managed. Furthermore, qualitative methodologies have a great potential to generate self-dialogues that provide insight into how teachers live, perceive, and manage such conflicts. Finally, research should be participative in nature so that teachers abandon their role as objects of research and become, instead, its subjects, in collaboration with researchers. In this manner, research on identity leads to changes in the professional identity of participants, in addition to furthering the knowledge available on the subject. Action research follows these guidelines, and it is therefore especially suited to this endeavor. Based on this characterization of the research on professional identity, some techniques are suggested for the collection of information because they foster reflection and consequently also promote development of identity. Some of these techniques are: life stories, narrative of teaching, diaries, case studies, critical events analysis, professional dilemmas, teacher or teaching metaphors, and inquiry-based learning.

Conceptions about teaching are important because they affect professional performance. Metaphors are a tool to identify them. In this qualitative study metaphors are used to gain insight into conceptions held by pre-service teachers, and their development during Initial Teacher Training in the Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education.A total of 247 students participated in this cross-sectional study; 145 were first-year students, and 102 were fourth-year students. Participants were requested to submit a metaphor following the open-ended formula: “the teacher is like…. because…” In order to categorize their answers, we used an inductive method. Afterwards, we calculated frequencies and percentages.Metaphors are grouped according to the following categories: a) Main Character; b) Support; c) Family; d) Teaching; e) Importance. The most frequent category is Support, followed by Teaching and Family. First-year pre-service teachers refer to Family, Teaching and the Main Character role of teachers more often than students in their fourth year, whereas the latter allude more often than the former to the teachers’ role as providers of Support and as Social Agents.There is evidence of a development from a transmissive educational perspective to a constructivist and transformative perspective of education, but there is no indication of any evolution towards a socioconstructivist outlook.

<p>La identidad profesional del profesorado afecta a la forma de ser y actuar como profesor (1).  Por ello, es importante trabajarla específicamente en la formación inicial. La interacción, la reflexión y la acción han demostrado ser elementos formativos eficaces para trabajar la identidad profesional en la formación inicial del profesorado. En esta experiencia educativa se han utilizado diferentes estrategias que incluyen dichos elementos con el objetivo de analizar su impacto específico en el aprendizaje y en el desarrollo de la identidad docente.  Las estrategias didácticas utilizadas en esta práctica educativa son la metáfora, el diario de prácticas, el aprendizaje basado en la investigación y las tertulias pedagógicas dialógicas llevadas a cabo en una metodología de tutoría entre iguales. La muestra está compuesta por 68 estudiantes del Máster en Formación del Profesorado de Educación Secundaria. Los resultados indican que las estrategias metodológicas utilizadas en esta experiencia de tutoría entre iguales han favorecido el desarrollo de la identidad profesional en un clima de aprendizaje positivo. Se puede concluir que promover estrategias basadas en la interacción, la reflexión y la acción ayuda a profundizar sobre la identidad del profesorado. Además, permite un desarrollo de las competencias docentes y un mayor conocimiento de estrategias didácticas específicas que pueden ser transferibles a su desempeño docente.</p><p> </p>