About Indrė Lebedytė-Mečionienė, winner of the best ERC 2024 poster. 

Indrė Lebedytė-Mečionienė is a PhD student in Educational Sciences at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She explores education both as a researcher and as a practitioner, since she also works as a chemistry teacher.Indre won the Best Poster Award at the Emerging Researchers’ Conference (ERC) 2024 in Nicosia, Cyprus, 2024.  To view the poster ,,The Experiences and Professional Identity Development of Novice Teachers in the Face of Educational Reality of the 21st Century”  click here. 

The poster presents the PhD project “The experiences and professional identity development of novice teachers in the face of the educational reality of the 21st century”. In Lithuania, around 60 percent of teachers are over 50 years old. In the coming years, there should be a significant increase in beginning teachers in schools, and they will be co-creators of future education. There is a lack of knowledge about who they are and how they experience the first years of their profession, which, research suggests, are perhaps the most important in the formation of beliefs (Hong, 2010, Voss and Kunter, 2020).

The research aims to understand how novice teachers experience the reality of education and how this influences their professional identity. This will be a longitudinal qualitative study, based on a conceptual analysis of relevant literature and narrative research (life history research) (Goodson, 1994). Approximately 10 beginning teachers will be followed over a 2.5-year period, with data collected through at least three in-depth interviews with each teacher, as well as personal reports of critical incidents.

For more information about the reseach read here