ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the reflections of the different socio-cultural contexts the students are directly or indirectly engaged in their inner dialogues between I-positions. The I-positions as the counterparts of the others in the self, embedded in the experiences in various social-psychological-cultural settings, give a voice to experiences with the others in constructing the future self. To deal with the person-context interrelatedness and with involvement of different environments (i.e., academic and non-academic) in the professional identity construction, in this chapter Bronfenbrenner's ecological perspective is applied.
Based on the findings, it is argued that the academic and non-academic socio-cultural settings contribute to the internalization of professional role by providing different experiences for the construction of professional identity and for the re-construction of the border between “us” and “non-us.” While the academic environment tended to feed into the emergence of feeling of “we-ness” (i.e., we are psychologists), the informal relations (i.e., non-academic and non-professional) in the everyday life context tended to generate self-understanding of “being different from the non-psychologists” (e.g., being an expert on human issues), in general. Confrontations as well as agreements between I-position I as a psychologist (in the future) and voices of friends, parents, acquaintances referred to extra-curricular settings playing role in forming self-understanding, together with the academic others.
