From heaven to earth. A comparison of ideals of ITE students

This article describes and discusses the outcomes of an open-ended questionnaire completed by Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students about their personal and professional ideals, that is, ideals they would like to pass on to their pupils, their ideal teacher and ideal school. We compared five groups of students that were formed on the basis of their personal ideals: a religious ideals group, a moral ideals group, a vocational ideals group, a materialistic ideals group and a remainder group. We found that those in the materialistic ideals group were more focused on their own ideal situations, like being married or being happy, than the others and that those in the vocational and moral ideals groups were less focused on these ideals. We also found that the moral and religious ideals groups had comparable personal and professional ideals, whereas the materialistic ideals group was clearly inconsistent. No clear picture emerged as to whether or not the vocational ideals group had distinctive professional ideals.