MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF PROFESSIONAL MASTER’S DEGREESNowadays, Professional Masters’ Degrees are important formative initiatives for teachers. This study reports results from an ongoing qualitative research project aiming at describing how participation in a Professional Master’s Degree contributes to the development of mathematics teachers’ professional identities. By adopting a socio-cultural perspective, we employed the notions of figured worlds and space of authoring as theoretical tools to analyze a Professional Master’s Degree and to develop an interpretative case study centered on André, a mathematics teacher who graduated from such program. The results reveal that the degree is a figured world focused mainly on disciplinary academic knowledge. André’s case reveals the difficulties experienced by the teacher when he tried to produce self-understandings about himself as a mathematics teacher articulating the voices and discourses coming from the master’s degree with those coming from his teaching practice.The results reveal that the studied professional master is a figurative world, concerned about developing teaching learnings centered in academic mathematics. André’s case shows some difficulties lived by the teacher when he tried to produce understandings about himself as a math teacher that articulate discourses and voices coming from the master with his own professional practice in school.
Keywords:
Professional identity, Mathematics teachers’ education, Figured worlds; Space of authoring, Narrative analysis