Truth and the renewal of knowledge: the case of mathematics education

Mathematics teacher educators are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to inspire prospective teachers to embrace inquiry-based pedagogies. The research study described in this paper asks what a teacher educator and faculty advisor can learn from prospective secondary mathematics teachers as they construct (and are constructed by) official pedagogical discourses embedded in mathematics classrooms. Drawing on the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu, I present several pervasive discourses, or dispositions, as storied by prospective mathematics teachers. These discourses highlight prospective teachers' negotiations of conflicting habitus-field fits during their teacher education field experience. The reflections put forth in this paper offer insights into the roles of mathematics teacher educators and teacher education programs in general.

Section: Discussion and Implications Of Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Dispositions in the field: viewing mathematics teacher education through the lens of Bourdieu’s social field theory

Nolan

2011

“…In Badiou's terms, knowledge will always need to be renewed (Brown, 2010). The inevitable gap in any story opens a space for subjective intervention that transcends or disrupts existing schema.…”

Section: Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Affective productions of mathematical experience

Walshaw

Brown

2011

Self Cite

In underscoring the affective elements of mathematics experience, we work with contemporary readings of the work of Spinoza on the politics of affect, to understand what is included in the cognitive repertoire of the Subject. We draw on those resources to tell a pedagogical tale about the relation between cognition and affect in settings of mathematical learning. Our interest is first captured in the way in which one teacher's priority of establishing an inclusive learning community occasionally harboured what appeared to be pedagogically restrictive conceptions of mathematics. Yet, the classroom practices that produced these conceptions promoted the students' motivation and provided meaningful access to mathematical learning within the classroom collectivity. In a second example, the postponement of scientific encapsulation in bodily imitations of planetary movement kept alive a shared dynamic sense of an elliptical orbit. In both of these cases, we draw on Spinoza's work to show how the affectivity of classroom practice constituted conceptions of cognition and of mathematical activity crucially linked to the imperatives of participation.

“…Recent educational research (see, e.g., Baldino & Cabral, 1998;Brown, 2008Brown, , 2010Marshall, 1995Marshall, , 1996Olssen, 2005;Peters, 2002;Walshaw, 2004) deals in one way or another with these antinomies, even if they are not identified as such. Within this context, a very important strand in contemporary educational research has been quite successful in revealing the workings of oppressive structures and the subtle differential ways in which knowledge and power are unevenly distributed among people.…”

Section: Synthesis and Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Education and the illusions of emancipation

Radford

2012

In this article, I deal with the question of emancipation in education. In the first part of the article, I argue that contemporary concepts of emancipation are explicitly or implicitly related to the idea of the sovereign subject articulated by Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. I contend that our modern enlightened concepts of emancipation rest on a dichotomy between an autonomous and self-sufficient subject and its sociocultural world. Referring to current research in mathematics education, I show how this dichotomy leads to intrinsic contradictions that haunt ongoing educational practices. These contradictions, I contend, are manifested in the hopeless efforts to bridge the gap between the deeds and thoughts of an autonomous individual and the regimes of reason and truth in which the individual finds itself subsumed. In particular, I argue that emancipation as understood in the enlightened modern sense remains a chimeric and unfulfillable dream. In the second part of the article, I suggest that emancipation can still be an orienting vector of educational practice and research, but it needs to be conceptualized differently: emancipation needs not be predicated in terms of individuals' freedom and individualist autonomy, but in critical-ethical terms.