How inconvenient assumptions affect preservice teachers’ uptake of new interactional patterns in mathematics: analysis and aspiration through a bifocal lens

Abstract

In this paper, I highlight the inadequacies of contemporary theoretical and philosophical orthodoxies to fully address pedagogic change. The required change is in mathematics education, and it has to do with enabling preservice teachers, upon graduation, to rework extant power relations in implementing new interactional patterns that centre the mathematics and the learner in dynamic, productive interaction. I interpret data from published research and my own teaching using psychological, overlaid with poststructuralist, constructs of the relationship between knowledge and action. In data interpretation I read through the words for a psychological interpretation (meaning), and I look at the words for poststructuralist indications of subjectification and identity formation (related to how well students recognise themselves as full participants in the combined discourses of mathematics and education). I have my cake and eat it; contradictory notions of the learner and learning to teach in innovative ways are held together to demonstrate (a) how it can happen that a teacher educator's aspirations can be held ransom to constituted assumptions that inconveniently work against change, and (b) how the recognition that humanist assumptions, mathematical proficiency and agency are discursively constituted (Davies, 1990) can suggest avenues for change in teacher education.

An argument for love in intercultural education for teacher education

“…If we wish to bring love into the historical moment in which we live, students and educators must be asked to implicate their own teaching with new theory, to examine the theories they already hold and to re-theorise their teaching and their practicum environments (Klein 2012;Segall 2008;Taguchi 2007). As teacher educators and as intercultural educators, we must ask ourselves: "Do my approaches build on love or on violence?"…”

Studying the role of human agency in school mathematics

“…In recent years, this concern has been taken up by researchers working from discursive and postmodern perspectives who have focused on student identities in relation to mathematics (e.g. Heyd-Metzuyanim & Sfard, 2012;Klein, 2012;Solomon, 2012). In general, however, attitudes and identities have been related to pedagogic issuesstyles of teaching and learning -and to public perceptions of mathematics, for example as a gendered activity (see Mendick, 2005), and not much attention has been paid in this context to the specific characteristics of the mathematical discourse in which students have been expected to participate.…”

Engaging with theoretical diffraction in teacher education

“…At best, theory is seen as a means for thinking in, with and about one's practice as a teacher. For such theorising to take place, students need to be asked to implicate their own teaching with theory, to examine the theories they already hold about education, teaching and learning, and to re-theorise their teaching and their practicum environments (Klein, 2012;Segall, 2008;Taguchi, 2007). Theoretical reflection comprises learning to understand the processes through which students are made subject, so that they 'are better positioned to resist particular forms of subjectivity, and thereby actively choose to think and do things differently' (Davies & Banks, 1995, 46), and involves a continuous process of unpacking and repacking one's own thinking and relating existing theories to other ways of thinking (Taguchi 2007, see also Green and Reid (2008), (Phillips, 2010).…”

“…The third challenge identified by Segall, reflection as an individual rather than a collective process, links to teacher education's traditional roots in the humanist understanding of the individual as autonomous and rational. According to Klein (2012), this kind of humanist discourse is problematic because it looks to the individual, rather than to the working of extant discourses, for the answer to educational problems. Typical but insufficient reflection, then, not only positions teachers to 'see their problems as their own, unrelated to those of other teachers', but also diminishes the possibility of any consideration of the social conditions of schooling and their implication in broader political, social and economic discourses that influence the teacher's work within the classroom (Segall 2008, 20;see also Zeichner 1996, 205).…”