Subject knowledge, personal history and professional change

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the relationship between generalist primary teachers in England and their mathematical subject knowledge. An analysis of interviews in which primary teachers talked about their experiences as learners of mathematics tells powerful stories about what it is to learn mathematics. The path to a loss of confidence and alienation from the subject is shown not to be a one-way street. However, the routes back to the subject are as varied as those that lead away from it. The story is told against a background of attempts to raise trainee teachers' subject knowledge in mathematics through the introduction of a National Curriculum for Teacher Training. It is suggested that, for individual teachers, the levels of emotional baggage which continue to be associated with mathematics make unproblematic calls for increasing levels of subject knowledge difficult to sustain.