European Mental Images and Professional Identity in the Initial Primary Teacher Education.

Teacher Education is seen by the European Commission as one priority of its educational strategies. Also, a great emphasis is currently put in European Union on building teachers' European identity by developing a common framework of teacher competences. However, very few surveys analyzed the impact of these ideals (European teacher, European school) on teacher professional identity, especially by drawing a comparison with its national dimension. This paper illuminates this liaison by introducing a new concept -- the European mental image. The survey used an adapted version of Osgood's semantic differential in order to study the impact of European mental images on Romanian students (n= 100) and teachers' (n=100) professional identity. The main results suggested that there are relevant differences between students and teachers' European mental images and these results could be used for the optimization of initial training of primary school teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]