E-Portfolio and identity construction. A program for newly hired teacher training

The paper aims to investigate the construction of a professional identity of newly hired teachers during their first year in school. The issue of identity has been the subject of numerous studies in recent years, perhaps because we are witnessing a crisis of professional identity linked to a more general questioning of social identities (Dubar, 2004). As pointed out by Barbier (1996), identity is a construct that social actors operate on themselves or about other social beings with whom they are in contact, within a specific situation. To support the development of professional identity, newly hired teachers were prompted to use an ePortfolio in their first year of access to the teaching profession. Following the suggestions of the studies on the “didactique professionnelle” (Mayen, 1999; Pastré, 2011), it was decided to start from real situations of lived experience and from their analysis, to build relevant and contextualized pathways to training. The results, emerging through the reading and the coding of the materials produced by the teachers involved in the program, show the dynamics involved in the construction of the professional identity of newly hired teachers and the ability of an ePortfolio to enlighten these movements and to favor them.