The contribution of a project-based learning course, designed as a pedagogy of practice, to the development of preservice teachers' professional identity

This study demonstrates a positive link between participation in an online project-based learning course, designed as a pedagogy of practice, and preservice teachers' professional-identity development process. The linguistic and content analyses revealed that the construction of professional identity was manifested through six motifs: Self-confidence, self-agency, sense of belonging, self-awareness, autonomy, and envisioning a future teaching self. Each of the motifs was portrayed with its characteristic set of time-oriented types of discourse (i.e., using past, present, and future tenses while describing feelings and thoughts regarding one's teaching self.) Based on the findings, we introduce a multidimensional model that explains identity construction as occurring at the intersection between the dimensions of identity and the temporal dimensions found in reflective discourse.