The Life History of a College Nursing Professor: Building a Professional Identity

Abstract

The review of the literature shows that their own teaching and learning experiences shape university professors’ formation of their professional identity. This paper examines university professors’ professional identity through life history. A qualitative approach was used, and the methodology employed was life history to gather events and happenings in people's lives as their data and then use analytical procedures to produce explanatory stories. One case was selected because it is a typical representative from a class of nursing faculty who has joined in the last five years at the University of Southern Mexico. The results were analyzed taking into account the basis of identity proposed by Burke and Stets (2009).