‘I’m not a “maths‐person”!’ Reconstituting mathematical subjectivities in aesthetic teaching practices

Abstract

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students’ attitudes towards maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10‐week alternative maths course. The investigated course adopts a feminist post‐structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative mathematics. The data used include the memory/narrative writings and process‐writings of 75 female teacher‐education students, collected from three different cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• deconstruction
• gender
• mathematics
• memories
• subjectivity

Notes

1. Ninety‐seven per cent of the students taking the Early Childhood Education course at Stockholm University are women.

2. All the students taking part in this one‐year course between 2004 and 2007 (120 students) were invited to participate in an ongoing research project on learning processes during the course of a year. The students who agreed signed a written document, which also allowed for the possibility of withdrawal during the year and up to one year after the conclusion of the course (98% of the students agreed to take part in the project). They agreed that the project could use all their written material and documentation produced during this year. They were also guaranteed full anonymity and the opportunity to read the research analysis before publication. The project has also featured in several reports (Lenz Taguchi 2005, 2006, 2007, forthcoming; Lind 2004; Palmer 2007, 2008). The data for the study described in this paper (carried out 2005–7) consists of 75 of the 120 students’ written material and documentation collected from the 10‐week maths course from three different cohorts.

3. Every maths course of 10 weeks involves five workshops involving maths/music, maths/dance, maths/visual arts, etc. These events have been documented by the students and teachers alike and theorised in report writings.

4. Other categories of words in the data material (a total of about 750 words) were: (1) words connected to a school discourse such as ‘black board’, ‘pencils’, ‘maths books’, ‘ruler’, etc. (I theorise around the school discourse in Palmer 2008); (2) words connected to everyday life such as ‘shopping’, ‘cooking’, ‘dieting’, ‘money’, etc.; (3) words connected to play and games such as ‘crosswords’, ‘hide and seek’, ‘suduko’; and (4) words connected with joy (only 5%) such as ‘fun’, ‘happiness’ and ‘amusing’. More can be read about this in Palmer (2007).