Feeling like a mathematics teacher: the education and transformation course

Abstract

In this article the trajectories of the socialization and constitution processes of the teaching the mathematics teachers are presented. The research was conducted with six undergraduate students and a mathematics teacher. During two years, length of the student’s teaching internship, the future teachers developed the memorial, an educational practice in which life histories are written with the purpose of mobilizing the individual and collective reflexive process, with a view to professional learning. Each history took shape from the meanings that each of the subjects attributed to their experiences: those lived before entering the university, along the actions developed in the initial teaching education, and the reflections on them during the memorial production. Upon telling their story, the future teachers and the teacher expressed their uniqueness and revealed the path to the professional identity’s constitution  that was defined from the social interactions provided by the different socializing contexts, but more intensely in the initial/continued teacher education. By participating in the various educational spaces, in which they had the opportunity to take advantage of numerous learning episodes, they were able to re-signify other learning experiences and understand that there is still a long way to go, including with regard to school mathematics, which, to their surprise is not as simple as it seemed. Becoming and feeling like amath teacher is not something that happens overnight, it is a continuous and long process that is influenced by a number of socio-historical factors.