Abstract
The private Catholic school system, unlike the public one, gave the primary school Head teachers, the status of primary school Headmasters, by assigning them greater responsibilities. A professional title listed on the National Register of Professional Certifications (RNCP) (2015) validates their initial training. It took nearly forty years to move from the recognition of a teacher in charge of the direction of a school (1976) to the creation of the position of Headmaster (2006-2010). The evolution went on progressively supported by issues of several institutional and legislative texts. Our dissertation aims at understanding how these institutional changes impacted the Headmasters’ identity dynamics over those forty years. Professional development is part of a social time that is why the processing of the material collected as comprehensive/biographical interviews is based on a compound method of analysis that used what has been called “sets of professional and training temporalities”. This method derives from the concept of “set of historicity” borrowed from the philosophy of history. A corpus of twelve interviews has been processed with this method. This inductive approach (grounded theory) leads to the creation of a typology of the identity forms of the primary school Headmasters according to a set of professional and training temporalities and it also expresses their different identity dynamics. The whole study is part of a comprehensive and phenomenological approach of the professional development of these primary school Headmasters which should be considered here as the emergence of a new professional group.Keywords: Professional development – professional group – Headmaster – professional identity – professional dynamics – identity dynamics – sets of historicity – social temporalities – sets of professional and training temporalities.