The teaching identity of competent university teachers

This research tries, first of all, to validate the model of competency profile of university teachers, recently developed by eight Catalan universities (Torra et al., 2012); the second objective is to test whether teachers considered competent share some features of a professional teaching identity, defined by the representations of teachers about their roles, teaching and assessment strategies and their feelings about their professional practice. To reach these objectives, we selected a sample of 20 teachers (10 men and 10 women) from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, considered competent and experienced teachers, and they answered an in-depth interview to give us an account of their declared teacher identity. After a content analysis of the interviews, the study concludes by showing that: a) in general terms, the competence profile model is confirmed, but the deeper sense and significance that these competences have to participants is conflictive. We identified five thematic spaces that posed discrepancies and conflicts with the theoretical model; b) the participants have clear regularities in the way of conceiving and coping with teaching in university classrooms. We think that the results provide valuable guidance for the design of training programs and evaluation systems for university teachers.