Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to present four training mechanisms of teaching that promote the process of the identity construction of remedial teachers. More specifically, we will analyze how the internship in remedial education for fourth-year Special Education students serves as an important stepping stone for identity development. It is built by a dynamic and iterative interaction game between what the student is as a person and as a teacher, the self-concept “I”, and what she or he is as a teacher in terms of the profession, the identification “we” (Gohier and Anadon, 2000). The internship’s context provides many opportunities to compare one’s knowledge, soft skill and expertise specific to one’s discipline, to the ones of other contributive disciplines related to the education field. Hence, it allows the student to adapt his or her perspective and to take position in order to develop competences to work in interdisciplinarity. Directed reflective works were collected from graduating students during their last internship and a questionnaire was collected one year after their integration in schools. The data analysis showed the different functions and feelings which are the constitutive components of the identity construction process (Gohier et al., 2007). From those analyses, an important decrease of the competence and self-worth feelings can be seen during the Remedial Teaching’s internship and in the first steps into the profession, while those two feelings were increasing in other training mechanisms.