Teachers telling tales: The narrative mediation of professional identity

This paper draws on the biographical narratives of two mathematics teachers who describe themselves as 'traditional' and 'connectionist' teachers respectively. Holland et al.'s amalgam of Bourdieu, Vygotsky and Bakhtin, including 'figured worlds', 'positionality', 'self-authoring', and 'world-making' is used to examine these narratives. Differences between the two narratives include (i) their histories of compliant or oppositional identities as learners, and subsequently as teachers; (ii) their different experiences of 'understanding' and 'tricks', and (iii) their different use of figures as r... Mehr ...