This article examines the social construction of identity among preservice teachers and the implications for professional identity. The author concludes that the results of this study have shown that students based their negative representations of the profession on what they perceived to be others’ representations rather than on personal experiences. Furthermore, while training is intended to guide prospective teachers and enable them to build a positive teacher identity, the findings reveal that the training programme was unable to deconstruct negative student representations, which had an impact on the identity constructed.