Exploring prospective teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching profession in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper is a work in progress exploring prospective teachers’ attitude towards the teaching profession in a Malaysian context. Professional identity is used as an analytical tool to understanding prospective teachers’ attitude. Ashforth & Mael (1989) refer to professional identity as a way an individual tries to determine their own professional group based on what they consider to be common characteristics of the group. The contents of common characteristics refer to several professional constructs such as attitudes and behaviour that exist in a specific group (Haslam, 2001; Haslam et. al 2000; Turner, 1982) as well as values, skills and knowledge that can differentiate between the same and different profession (Glaser-Segura, Mudge, Bratianu & Dumitru, 2010). A combination of focus groups and individual interviews were used to explore prospective teachers’ perception on ‘who am I this time?’ Three groups of prospective teachers are included in the study: trainees undergoing their teaching practice in Malaysian secondary schools, career change trainees in their final semester of teaching training and first year trainees undergoing their teacher education programme. All trainees are from the same teacher education institution in Malaysia. All interviews were transcribed and coded line-by-line in order to facilitate the development of analytic categories. Five main categories of professional identities were identified: professional orientation, task orientation, commitment of teaching, self-efficacy and social interaction of prospective teachers. These categories were further explored to identify prospective teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching profession. In addition, the results also suggest that professional identity development among prospective teachers involves a socialisation process in both formal and informal contexts such as family and society influences, socio-economic environment and educational institution.