Professional Faces: Pre-service Secondary Teachers’ Awareness of Issues of Self-disclosure on Social-networking Sites

Abstract

An important component of teacher education is the emphasis on what it means to be a professional in the field.  Teacher educators must help pre-service teachers recognize that what may be acceptable in their lives now may not be when they are looking for their first job or once they are in the classroom.  One such issue is the use of social networking websites, such as Facebook, and how the information that teachers post can affect them as professionals.  This paper discusses the results of a study of 68 pre-service secondary teachers and their understanding of the impact of self-disclosure on social networking as future educators.  The results suggest that while pre-service teachers found many of the issues at hand to be common sense, they developed a deeper understanding of the ramifications of unprofessional self-disclosure on social networking sites after being presented with a number of case studies and examples.