Elizabeth de Freitas

Troubling teacher identity: preparing mathematics teachers to teach for diversity

This paper reports on an action research project designed to explore the complexities of pre‐service mathematics teacher resistance to social justice issues. Research on equity and mathematics education has indicated that such resistance seems particularly strong for mathematics teachers. Twelve pre‐service mathematics teachers participated in a course‐based research project to explore this issue. Participants completed a classroom discourse analysis and a self‐study narrative as part of their secondary mathematics methods course. The findings suggest that attention to issues of identity construction within school mathematics can be successfully embedded in methods courses in order to better prepare mathematics teachers to teach for diversity.This paper reports on an action research project designed to explore the complexities of pre‐service mathematics teacher resistance to social justice issues. Research on equity and mathematics education has indicated that such resistance seems particularly strong for mathematics teachers. Twelve pre‐service mathematics teachers participated in a course‐based research project to explore this issue. Participants completed a classroom discourse analysis and a self‐study narrative as part of their secondary mathematics methods course. The findings suggest that attention to issues of identity construction within school mathematics can be successfully embedded in methods courses in order to better prepare mathematics teachers to teach for diversity.

The Classroom as Rhizome: New Strategies for Diagramming Knotted Interactions

This article calls attention to the unexamined role of diagrams in educational research and offers examples of alternative diagramming practices or tools that shed light on classroom interaction as a rhizomatic process. Drawing extensively on the work of Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Châtelet, this article explores the power of diagramming as a creative force in research rather than a reductive one. The concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and knot are developed and applied to the study of classroom interaction. The author then shows how these concepts and their application to classroom interaction can be studied through topological knot diagrams. The author discusses the specific qualities of knot diagrams that make them suitable tools for the study of rhizomatic processes and offers some examples of such diagrams. The author offers these knot diagrams as tools that actually undermine the usual conventions of graphic representation in our field, not simply to disrupt for the sake of disruption, but to in...This article calls attention to the unexamined role of diagrams in educational research and offers examples of alternative diagramming practices or tools that shed light on classroom interaction as a rhizomatic process. Drawing extensively on the work of Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Châtelet, this article explores the power of diagramming as a creative force in research rather than a reductive one. The concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and knot are developed and applied to the study of classroom interaction. The author then shows how these concepts and their application to classroom interaction can be studied through topological knot diagrams. The author discusses the specific qualities of knot diagrams that make them suitable tools for the study of rhizomatic processes and offers some examples of such diagrams. The author offers these knot diagrams as tools that actually undermine the usual conventions of graphic representation in our field, not simply to disrupt for the sake of disruption, but to invite speculation about how one might develop different diagramming habits that better capture the entanglement of interaction.

Teaching for Diversity by Troubling Whiteness: Strategies for Classrooms in Isolated White Communities.

This paper explores strategies to help prepare pre‐service teachers from a predominantly white, relatively isolated island in Atlantic Canada to teach for diversity. The paper proposes a modified framework for ‘teacher identity development’ that pivots around three foci for enhancing teacher awareness and commitment to action: (1) relations of power and privilege; (2) youth culture and critical media literacy; (3) theory as an interpretive tool. These foci contribute to a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ through which white pre‐service teachers confront their resistance to and complicity in the inequities that play themselves out in the school system. The ongoing capacity to sustain the emotional labour of confronting this discomfort is seen as critical to making a positive difference.

Teaching style and learning in a quantitative classroom

Education research over the last few decades has focused on the debate over which classroom pedagogies best encourage learning: teacher-centred or student-centred. Although research appears to support the philosophy that student-centred teaching provides for better learning, the supporting research is frequently limited to observational studies or limited in experimental design. Despite this, the trend has been to encourage teachers to adopt a more student-centred approach both in the teaching of the course material and as a model for future teachers. A pilot study was conducted in an introductory university statistics course using a Latin Square Design to experimentally collect both quantitative and qualitative data pertaining to student performance. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of teaching style on learning, assess these approaches in quantitative courses, and establish protocols for such studies using a statistically controlled design.

Plotting Intersections along the Political Axis: The Interior Voice of Dissenting Mathematics Teachers.

The supposed apolitical nature of mathematics is an institutional frame that functions to sustain specific power structures within schools. This paper disrupts the common assumption that mathematics (as a body of knowledge constructed in situated historical moments)is free from entrenched ideological motives. Using narrative inquiry, the paper examines the ways in which novice mathematics teachers negotiate the intersection of curriculum and institutional politics. After outlining a theoretical framework, the paper performs a story entitled ‘political text’ which reveals the plaintive, dissenting voice of a novice teacher as she negotiates the friction between her life history and the ossified canonicity of mathematics curriculum. Through the critical and reflexive voice of the novice teacher, the naturalized concepts of counting and measurement are playfully revisioned. The frequent silencing of such oppositional readings underscores the deeply embedded conflict between voice and text in the contemporary mathematics classroom.

De)facing the Self Poststructural Disruptions of the Autoethnographic Text

This article draws on Lacanian theories of subjectivity to examine notions of the self in autoethnography. The authors discuss philosophical differences between Humanist and post-Humanist notions of the self and show how these notions are correlated to particular self-study genres, such as confession and testimony. The authors argue that autoethnographic narratives exhibit contradictory tendencies toward both Humanist and post-Humanist conceptions of subjectivity. Questionnaire responses from four participants are analyzed for evidence of this contradiction. The article concludes by suggesting that resolving the contradiction is neither possible nor desirable.

New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity: Assembling the posthuman subject

Emphasis on discourse and language-use has fueled the study of identity in education over the last few decades. This paper argues that these approaches fail to fully account for the complex materiality of life, and should be supplemented by new materialist tools for studying language as material. This new materialist approach considers language outside of the usual information–communication model. We argue that this approach is fruitful in studying identity, offering a path around the agency–structure binary where language either serves the subject in self-determination or the institution in furthering normative control. Identity can be studied as an assemblage that does not begin or end in the individual, but partakes of a dynamic affective force field luring posthuman subjects into activity.

What Were You Thinking? A Deleuzian/Guattarian analysis of communication in the mathematics classroom

Abstract The primary aim of this article is to bring the work of Deleuze and Guattari to bear on the question ofcommunication in the classroom. I focus on the mathematics classroom, where agency and subjectivity are highly regulated by the rituals of the discipline, and where neoliberal psychological frameworks continue to dominate theories of teaching and learning. Moreover, the nature ofcommunication in mathematics classrooms remains highlyelusive and problematic, due in part to the distinct relationship the discipline has with verbal language and thought. I first discuss current attempts to better address the embodied nature ofcommunication in mathematics classrooms, and argue that these remain overly logo-centric and language-centric in their conception of thinking. I then show how the work of Deleuze and Guattari on thought as a radical disruptive event can be used effectively to critique current pedagogical practices that privilege a narrow conception of communication in the classroom. I examine a set of exemplary classroom videos used in mathematics teacher education to argue that the current approach fails to honor the highly creative and disruptive nature ofthinking.

Mathematics and its other: (dis)locating the feminine

In this article, the author examines how school mathematics maps itself onto the body, delineating the contours of a gendered learner. The author draws on Judith Butler to discuss the process by which school mathematics contributes to the stabilising/legitimating of a cultural arbitrary like gender, and how mathematics inscribes otherness onto the feminine. A student narrative entitled ‘Im/perfect Other’ is offered as a form of disruptive writing that might provisionally trouble or unfix the binary between the feminine and mathematics. The focus of the narrative is on the passionate attachment to mastery and submission in/through school mathematics, and the possibility of an emergent autonomy erupting through and against the process of subjectification.In this article, the author examines how school mathematics maps itself onto the body, delineating the contours of a gendered learner. The author draws on Judith Butler to discuss the process by which school mathematics contributes to the stabilising/legitimating of a cultural arbitrary like gender, and how mathematics inscribes otherness onto the feminine. A student narrative entitled ‘Im/perfect Other’ is offered as a form of disruptive writing that might provisionally trouble or unfix the binary between the feminine and mathematics. The focus of the narrative is on the passionate attachment to mastery and submission in/through school mathematics, and the possibility of an emergent autonomy erupting through and against the process of subjectification.

Pre‐service teachers and the re‐inscription of whiteness: Disrupting dominant cultural codes through textual analysis

This paper draws from theorists in critical pedagogy and cultural studies in order to name and then trace the re‐inscription and circulation of normative whiteness in geographically isolated rural communities. The paper examines a particular rural Canadian maritime community where my role as teacher‐educator and my commitment to developing reflexive teacher practice brought me face‐to‐face with the “perpetual pedagogy” of a media‐saturated and electronically connected North America. The paper contains a textual analysis of specific cultural hip‐hop texts, theoretical reflections on the relevant research regarding whiteness, and an auto‐ethnographic framing that recounts my own participation as a teacher‐educator in the context.This paper draws from theorists in critical pedagogy and cultural studies in order to name and then trace the re‐inscription and circulation of normative whiteness in geographically isolated rural communities. The paper examines a particular rural Canadian maritime community where my role as teacher‐educator and my commitment to developing reflexive teacher practice brought me face‐to‐face with the “perpetual pedagogy” of a media‐saturated and electronically connected North America. The paper contains a textual analysis of specific cultural hip‐hop texts, theoretical reflections on the relevant research regarding whiteness, and an auto‐ethnographic framing that recounts my own participation as a teacher‐educator in the context.