Conference Program

Debates about the futures of education have intensified in recent years, driven by accelerating social, institutional, and cultural transformations (Nóvoa & Alvim, 2020), particularly the expansion of digital technologies, raising fundamental questions about the role of teachers. Among these, none is more unsettling than the possibility that teachers may be replaced, or rendered peripheral, in increasingly technology-mediated educational environments.

The concept of school form, understood as a specific mode of socialisation, places the teacher at its very centre. As Vincent, Lahire and Thin (2001) argue, the scholastic mode of socialisation is defined by an unprecedented social relationship between a 'master' and a 'pupil': a pedagogical relationship. Similarly, the grammar of schooling, as described by Tyack and Tobin (1994), has long organised pedagogical life around the centrality of the teacher instructing students. Yet the school form should not be read as rigid or immutable, as it can adapt and change without undermining its overall coherence.

In this context of technological transformation and institutional continuity, the perspectives of those preparing to enter the profession become particularly relevant. How do pre-service teachers navigate these anxieties, and what kind of professionals do they aspire to become? More specifically, how do they imagine their professional role in the school of the future? To what extent do their narratives reproduce or challenge inherited conceptions of the teacher? And what do these imaginaries, shaped by both aspirations and fears, reveal about emerging professional identities?

Drawing on Biesta's (2020) notion of teaching as a professional art, and on research on how student teachers construct professional identity (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2010), we examine the potential of future teachers to reimagine their role, attending to the values, relational orientations, and anxieties they project onto the future school.

Empirically, this communication draws on data from a pedagogical experiment in two master's-level teacher education courses in the area of social sciences and humanities in Portugal, involving 70 students, with two stages. In the first stage, students produced a reflective text imagining school life and their daily work as teachers in 2050. In the second stage, they generated AI images representing the school of the future.

The analysis focuses on the self-positionings that emerge from these narratives. How do pre-service teachers locate themselves within future educational scenarios? Do they position themselves as central or peripheral in the school and classroom? Which words and metaphors do they associate with teaching? How do they envision their relationships with other professionals and educational actors? Does technology appear in their imaginaries as a support for their practice or as a threat to their relevance?

Through this lens, we explore whether future teachers see themselves as agents of transformation, as relational and humanising presences irreplaceable by any technological substitute, or, conversely, as potentially dispensable figures in an increasingly automated educational landscape. The findings contribute to discussions on teacher professional identity and well-being, shedding light on how future teachers imagine and position themselves within a profession whose role, while historically central to the school form, is today being questioned.