Yvette Solomon

Not belonging? What makes a functional learner identity in undergraduate mathematics?

Analysis of interviews with first‐year undergraduate mathematics students shows that ‘not belonging’ is a prevalent theme in their accounts of the experience of studying mathematics, even though their choice of degree‐level study indicates a belief that they are at least at some level ‘good at maths’. Instead, they tend to describe themselves as marginalised: they are aligned with mathematical procedures but do not contribute to them. A perception of oneself as a ‘legitimate peripheral participant’—as a novice with the potential to make constructive connections in mathematics—is rare. This article examines the potentially conflicting communities of practice within which undergraduate students find themselves, and presents a typology of their related learner identities. The analysis shows that undergraduate functionality in the sense of belief in oneself as a learner is not necessarily associated with the identity of novice/apprentice, as might be predicted by a community of practice model. On the contrary, students who describe identities of heavily alignment can appear unworried by their lack of participation in mathematics, successful as they are in the more dominant local communities of practice. It is argued that these, together with an institutional culture of entrenched beliefs about ability and ownership of knowledge, determine students’ experiences and identities in ways which are noticeably gendered. The implications for teaching in mathematics and in higher education more generally are discussed.

Mathematics and Narrative.

Recent work in the area of mathematics education has been informed by the process writing movement in language education and by challenges to dominant literacies in school subjects including mathematics and science. Specifically, writers concerned with the exclusion of many children and adults from dominant mathematical practices have argued that narrative approaches to mathematics are both desirable and possible. An examination of mathematics writing in historical perspective suggests, however, that mathematicians operate within a number of non-narrative genres through which mathematical meanings are constituted; this paper argues that the solution to underachievement in mathematics lies in explicit teaching of such genres and a recognition of a mathematical tradition which lies outside of individual authorship.

Intimate talk between parents and their teenage children: Democratic openness or covert control?

In so far as modern families subscribe to an ideal of democracy, then adolescence is a time in which the democratic ideal in the family becomes an object of explicit focus as parents and teenagers strive towards a renegotiation of their relative positions. Teenagers need to develop their adult identities and a sense of agency, while at the same time, parents who have invested both personally and financially in their children must reconsider this relationship and come to terms with the reality of the returns from that investment. Intimate relations imply both democracy and equality: in what Giddens (1992) calls the ‘pure relationship’, individuals continuously reevaluate the relationship in terms of the satisfactions which it delivers in their ‘project of the self’. This paper argues that the twin ideals of democracy and intimacy necessarily clash in parent-teenager relationships, resulting in a further complication of the negotiation processes already identified in previous research (Brannen, 1999; Brannen et al., 1994; Hofer et al., 1999).While both parents and their teenage children subscribe to the discourse of openness and honesty as the route to both intimacy and democracy, there are tensions within the concept of openness because both parties have opposing goals in the trading of information. For parents, information gain means the retention of power and control, while for teenagers, with-holding information from their parents ensures their privacy, power and identity.

Safety in numbers: mathematics support centres and their derivatives as social learning spaces

This article reports on data gathered from second and third year mathematics undergraduates at two British universities which have developed Mathematics Support Centres, primarily with a view to supporting skills development for engineering students. However, an unforeseen consequence of the support centres was the mathematics students’ colonisation of the physical space, and the development of group learning strategies which involve a strong community identity. Drawing on a socio‐cultural theoretical framework, based primarily in the concept of a figured world, the article explores the students’ perceptions of mathematics learning and their experiences of university‐level teaching, focusing on the ways in which they collectively build images of themselves as participants in an undergraduate mathematics community, resourced by the physical safe spaces that they have created, and which they now regard as essential sites of their learning.

Swapping Stories: Comparing Plots: Triangulating Individual Narratives within Families

Issues relating to the trustworthiness of research narratives are particularly relevant for those family researchers who attempt to interpret, legitimate and represent comparative accounts of family life collected from different family members within the same family unit. We discuss these issues with reference to research we have carried out with 57 family groups. In confronting the analysis that emerges from a process of comparison and combining differing perspectives we ask: whose story are we telling? This question raises deeper epistemological problems regarding the ‘crisis of representation’ in social research. We argue for a resolution of the crisis by the adoption of a post‐positivist position in which we are clear that the emerging interpretation and representation of our disparate and complex data set is our story. Furthermore, we argue that we need to incorporate ourselves within our emerging narrative, bringing a ‘strong objectivity’ (Harding, 1993) to bear on our interpretation.

Limits and potentials of social networking in academia: case study of the evolution of a mathematics Facebook community

The use of social networking services has rapidly increased in recent years, especially by university students. Some authors assert that they have educational potential in terms of promoting collaborative learning practices among undergraduate students which enhance engagement and understanding. This possibility is particularly relevant to mathematics learning, because university communities are frequently experienced as isolating and performance-oriented. This case study reports on the use of Facebook to support mathematical communication and more participative learning identities within a UK university mathematics department. It describes how the reactive formation of a student-led Facebook community became a source of conflict within the wider academic social community and how this conflict was eventually resolved. While it raises questions about the extent to which Facebook can encourage open collaborative learning within the wider context of student aspirations in a competitive climate, it notes its potential for fostering cross-cohort student support in a subject which frequently induces anxiety in its students.

Dealing with ‘fragile identities’: resistance and refiguring in women mathematics students

Many learners may be successful in mathematics but nevertheless see themselves as existing only on the margins of the practice, or as lacking stability in it – in this sense, they have what can be called a fragile identity. Although this kind of relationship with mathematics is not limited to girls and women, they do appear to express such fragile identities more often or more readily. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from undergraduates in three English universities, this paper presents an analysis of the way in which university mathematics is differentially experienced by men and women, and of the part this may play in women’s ongoing narratives of self as mathematicians. It is suggested that some women resist traditional positionings in the mathematics world, drawing on local resources which enable a sense of agency as successful students and a refiguring of their relationships with mathematics.

Teaching Mathematics: Ritual, Principle and Practice

One of the criticisms of standard teaching practices is that they support merely ‘ritual’ as opposed to ‘principled’ knowledge, that is, knowledge which is procedural rather than being founded on principled explanation. This paper addresses issues and assumptions in current debate concerning the nature of mathematical knowledge, focusing on the ritual/principle distinction. Taking a discussion of centralism in logic and mathematics as its start-point, it seeks to resolve these issues through an examination of mathematics as a community of practice and the teachers role as epistemological authority in inducting pupils into such practices.

'You become a man in a man's world': is there discursive space for women in surgery?

The UK set a target of 20% of the surgical consultant workforce to be represented by women by 2009; in 2012, it remains 7%. Studies have attributed this shortfall to the nature of careers in surgery and differing career aspirations among women.

Reshaping understandings of teaching-learning relationships in undergraduate mathematics: An activity theory analysis of the role and impact of student internships

This article presents an analysis of an intervention intended to address an aspect of undergraduate mathematics education that is frequently described as a situation of deadlock, between second-year undergraduates who are disillusioned with their university mathematics experience, and mathematics departments which describe many students as lacking interest in, and awareness of, the nature of university-level mathematics and how it is learned: whilst departments strive to support such students, the extent to which they can do so is often seen as limited. The SYMBoL project was designed to address this situation in terms of improving dialogue between students and staff through the introduction of undergraduate internships which challenged traditional hierarchical roles and relationships. Using third generation activity theory to analyse the nature and impact of the internship role, we show how the project legitimised the student voice as channelled through that of the interns, created shifts in perceptions of the problem, and began a process of transformational learning about possibilities in undergraduate mathematics teaching. We consider the implications for developing university mathematics teaching within the wider context of tensions across university systems.