Conference Program

This paper offers a critical analysis of the Italian academic literature on the teaching profession. After outlining the main findings and the most established research strands within the international scholarship, it highlights the specific features of the Italian debate. The contribution is based on a multidisciplinary review of education research—spanning pedagogy, sociology, psychology, and anthropology—drawing on articles published in leading specialist journals and major volumes over the past few decades. The review identifies three broad research axes: (a) teacher education and professional competences; (b) professional identities and expertise; and (c) the structural characteristics of the profession and career trajectories. The Italian system is marked by delayed entry into the profession and prolonged contractual precariousness, with negative repercussions for professional stability and motivation. Professional induction remains weakly institutionalised, continuing professional development is unevenly structured, and evaluation processes are increasingly shaped by accountability-oriented logics. These dynamics contribute to the profession's declining attractiveness, further exacerbated by occupational stress and burnout, and point to the need for systemic reforms grounded in robust empirical evidence. The paper concludes with a set of policy proposals to enhance teachers’ professional well-being.

Across Europe, teacher shortages, intensifying accountability regimes, and rapid socio-digital transformation are reshaping the conditions of teaching. These developments have raised growing concerns about teachers’ professional well-being and the sustainability of teaching careers (OECD, 2025; UNESCO, 2024). Recent research suggests that teachers’ well-being is strongly influenced by organisational conditions, professional autonomy, and opportunities for collegial support rather than by individual factors alone (Lähteenmäki et al., 2025). In this context, professional teacher education institutions play a crucial role in supporting the development of resilient professional identities and collaborative professional cultures.

This paper discusses the Finnish contribution to the Erasmus+ project Connecting Teachers – A Community of Practice to Promote Teachers' Well-being (2025–2028), focusing particularly on vocational and professional teacher education in universities of applied sciences. The Finnish teacher education system provides a distinctive context for examining the relationship between professional identity, institutional structures, and well-being. Vocational teachers typically enter the profession with strong occupational backgrounds and subsequently complete pedagogical teacher education (60 ECTS), which aims to develop pedagogical competence, guidance skills, and reflective professional practice (Jyrhämä, 2021).

However, contemporary transformations in vocational education, including competence-based curricula, personalised learning pathways, and stronger integration with workplaces, have expanded and diversified teachers’ roles. VET teachers increasingly act as facilitators of learning, mentors, network collaborators, and developers of learning environments. These expanding expectations can create tensions in teachers’ professional identity formation and affect their well-being. Studies on vocational teachers highlight that professional identity is often negotiated between prior occupational expertise and emerging pedagogical expertise (Tapani & Salonen, 2019; Antera & Teräs, 2024). At the same time, organisational support and collaborative professional environments have been shown to play a significant role in sustaining teachers’ job satisfaction and well-being (Chen, 2026).

Drawing on these perspectives, the paper analyses how Finnish professional teacher education programmes seek to support sustainable professional identity development and teacher well-being through collaborative learning and communities of practice. Participation in professional communities can provide spaces for collective reflection, mutual recognition, and the integration of professional knowledge into shared practices (Wenger, 1998). Research in vocational education also indicates that collaborative practices and peer learning can strengthen teachers’ capacity to adapt to educational change and enhance professional agency (Sirk, 2024).

From a sociological perspective, well-being is therefore understood not as an individual psychological attribute but as a relational and institutional phenomenon that emerges within organisational cultures and professional communities. Finnish professional teacher education programmes increasingly emphasise reflective practice, peer learning, and collaborative development work with VET educational institutes. These pedagogical approaches aim to strengthen professional teachers’ sense of belonging, professional agency, and capacity to engage sustainably with the complex demands of contemporary education.

The paper contributes to the panel’s comparative discussion by examining how teacher education institutions can foster communities of practice that support both professional identity formation and teacher well-being. The Finnish case suggests that embedding collaborative professional learning within teacher education can help renew the social and cultural foundations of teaching in rapidly transforming educational fields.

Several studies have highlighted the central role of teachers in students’ learning processes and their contribution to educational outcomes, as well as their long-term impact on different life outcomes, such as the attainment of higher educational qualifications and higher levels of income (Chetty, Friedman & Rockoff, 2014; Hanushek, 2011; Rockoff, 2004). These findings have strengthened the attention devoted to the quality of teaching and to the development of teachers’ professional competences, also in relation to the role that effective teachers can play in reducing educational inequalities among students (Argentin, 2018).

At the same time, the concept of teacher effectiveness does not have a single, universally accepted definition, as it is linked to different indicators and dimensions of teachers’ work. Moreover, the literature on teacher professionalism highlights the complex nature of teaching, which requires the integration of disciplinary, pedagogical, relational and organizational competences, together with a continuous commitment to professional development (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Ianes et al., 2019). In addition, several studies show that in order to fully exercise their professional role, teachers need adequate personal and professional resources. These resources, together with the support perceived within the school context, are also associated with teachers’ professional well-being (Fiorilli et al., 2019; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2017). From this perspective, education and teacher training policies can represent an important context through which to support teachers’ professional development and the resources necessary to carry out educational work. In the Italian context, the regulatory framework concerning teacher education has undergone several reforms in recent decades, from the Scuole di Specializzazione all’Insegnamento Secondario (SSIS) to the Tirocinio Formativo Attivo (TFA), and more recently to the new university-based qualification pathways. These reforms have progressively redefined access to the teaching profession, the professional image of teachers and the competences expected from them.

Starting from these premises, the aim of this contribution is to analyse the transformations of teacher professionalism in Italian secondary schools by connecting teacher education policies, professional competences and the conditions under which teachers exercise their profession. The paper proposes a desk analysis of the main regulatory frameworks that have governed teacher education in Italian secondary schools, combined with a review of the scientific literature and an analysis of secondary sources and data related to teachers’ professional conditions.

The contribution aims to position at the crossroads of issues concerning adult education and the pedagogy of work and organizations, from both an epistemological and methodological perspective. The rationale lies in the interest in the initial, and above all, continuous training of teachers who, as adults, require an approach oriented toward the interpretation of experiences and, consequently, the systems of meaning (Mezirow, 2003) of which they are carriers. Furthermore, this work intersects with the specificities of pedagogical research within organizational contexts by considering teachers as an integral part of the school environment; understood as a workplace, this setting can become a place for either the enhancement or depletion of learning processes (Alessandrini, 2004) and professional reflexivity.

The focus on teachers' professional reflexivity is observable internationally in reports highlighting the importance of promoting reflective thinking and well-being in both initial and continuing teacher education (OECD, 2025) to re-imagine education as a common goal (UNESCO, 2024). Within the Italian regulatory landscape, the guidelines for initial teacher training (DPCM, 2023) call for learning outcomes in terms of teachers' reflective and self-evaluative competencies, both in purely disciplinary fields and in the digital facilitation of students’ learning processes.

Reflective thinking as a driver for inquiry that liberates one from routine and impulsive action is a crucial theme in Dewey’s work, in which three key values of incorporating such thinking as an educational aim can be identified. In line with this perspective, Schön (2010) proposes an inquiry trajectory that centers on the cognitive activity engaging professionals – within the relationship between action and thought, starting from and in view of action (Baldacci et al., 2023) – and seeks a new epistemology of professions, challenging the concept of technical rationality.
Reflection on one’s own experiences plays a crucial role in activating career guidance practices, as the reflective act regarding one's life experiences can be configured as a moment in which one allows oneself to distance experiences from the self. This improves focus and, consequently, introduces “a level of self-awareness that increases the intensity of feeling” (Mortari, 2019, p. 129), capable of "awakening the awareness of the fragility of one's own being" (p. 150).
Based on these considerations, it is possible to identify the teacher's task of promoting the habitus of reflection by becoming an “intentional guide”, endowed with an ethical responsibility “in pursuing one of the primary tasks of the democratic school: to offer all students the tools and opportunities to position themselves, as adults and citizens, in a complex world” (Formenti et al., 2017, p. 76). This task resonates as a renewal of Morin’s warning: “the reflective attitude of the human mind, which enables it to consider itself by doubling itself, should be encouraged and stimulated in everyone” (Morin, 2000, p. 52).

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.