Abstract
Teacher education and professionalism are believed to be key to school reform in Kazakhstan (OECD, 2014). As a part of the school reform initiatives, Kazakhstan has been actively investing into teachers’ in-service professional development, teachers’ social support and school infrastructure. Interestingly, however, pre-service teacher education has not been part of those reform initiatives (Yakavets et al., 2017). Whilst teacher professionalism has been actively discussed at the in-service level, there is little to no research on it at the pre-service level. As such, this study aims at exploring future teachers’ professional identity i.e. what factors can influence the development of teachers’ professional identity at the pre-service level. A case study was conducted to explore Year 4 (graduating year) students’ experiences in one pedagogical university in Kazakhstan. The study outcomes indicate a link between pre-service-teachers’ professional identity, quality of students’ professional experiences and their emotions. The development professional identity is viewed as highly emotional process, wherein pedagogical universities must integrate self-reflection and emotional awareness in their academic programmes.