Teacher Candidates’ Silhouettes: Supporting Mathematics Teacher Identity Development in Secondary Mathematics Methods Courses

ABSTRACT

In this paper, teacher educators located at three different universities across the United States share findings emerging from our collaboration around a suite of three activities that engage our teacher candidates (TCs) around their identities as future mathematics teachers. In particular, our TCs engaged in a suite of identity-based activities in order to promote reflexivity across dimensions in a way that we argue is not possible through a single activity. We implemented activities to promote our TCs’ reflexivity, as well as to engage in critical self-reflection on our own practice as mathematics teacher educators. We explore the relationship between multidimensional reflexivity and beginning teachers who hold commitments toward justice and equity in mathematics education. Three activities – a mathematics autobiography, a silhouette, and an identity card sort – were selected, modified, implemented, and reflected on across our secondary mathematics methods courses, with the goal of promoting reflexivity across dimensions. We refer to reflexivity across dimensions as one’s ability to explore one’s identity within various analytical frames. The autobiography, silhouette, and card sort offered opportunities for TCs to explore the dimensions of their narrative, discursive, and categorical reflexivity, respectively. We found that TCs engaged in continual questioning and perturbing of their positions in society in ways that contributed to their sense of self and promoted reflexivity across the dimensions of TCs’ mathematics identities.

KEYWORDS:

• mathematics teacher education
• mathematics teacher identity
• equity
• race
• gender

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ All names are pseudonyms.

² As we seek to honor the complexity of one’s gender and racial identities, we note that for this study, our participants’ gender and sex (i.e., man/woman and male/female) appear within the same categories. Similarly, participants’ racial and ethnic identities may appear together, although they do not always indicate markers of a particular individual’s identity (e.g., one participant identified as Chicana without identifying as Latinx or Latina).

³ The reader may note that the number of participants may differ across each activity. This is due to both data collection across multiple institutions, terms, and students’ varied consent across assignments.

⁴ All participants in this study identified as cis-gender.

⁵ Adapted from The Impact of Identity in K-8 Mathematics: Rethinking Equity Based Practices.