Curating Mathematical I/identities

• In Event: 63.026 - Teaching and Learning Mathematics: How Identity Keeps Count as a System Premised on Multidirectional Dimensions

Abstract

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
Research on identity has generated contested theoretical frameworks. Darragh (2016) posits two contrasting and concomitant metaphors for identity research - psychology (acquisition) and sociology (action/performative). Radovic et al. (2018) identifies three dimensions social—subjective; enacted—representational; and change—stability. For Langer-Osuna and Edmonde (2017), identity is approached through discursive (poststructural), positional, narrative, and psychoanalytics. However, Bekerman and Zembylas (2018) suggest that identity is a word borrowed from mathematics where it has specific meaning. Framing identity as a construct we understand metaphorically, I propose that two of the grounding metaphors for the study of ‘I/identities’ in Mathematics Education (I/iME) (and elsewhere) are ‘matter’ (object-acquisition/deficit) and ‘energy’ (enacted performance).

Framing I/iME as a form of emergent trans-phenomena requires a transdisciplinary approach to its study (Mitchell & Willetts, 2009). Consequently, following Sfard’s (1998) warning, I attend to the multiple sites of identity production and classification such as: genetic, neurological, melaninic, gender, socio-metric, and psychometric. To this end I draw attention to the metaphor of ‘curating’ I/identities as an information theoretic practice. To wit, IF one conceptualizes I/identity through an information lens, then an entailment is that I/identity development is a curatorial process.

My perspective on curation deviates from other cultural approaches by building on cultural practice to a framing of curation as purposefully engaging with storied human lives in relation to place and time with others. A curated exhibit or artifact—and by extension self—is not a dead thing. It is an object made sensible and communicable by a being put into relation with other objects of learning with some awareness of one’s own— or that of a communal one—value-system.

Purpose
The purpose of this work is to explore the specific affordances of the metaphor of ‘curating’ with respect to representing and documenting prospective teachers’ developing mathematical identities.

Method
Prospective teachers’ mathematical identity was explored through the use of the metaphor of curation to understand the philosophical argument, speculative inquiry, and self as students curated autobiographical mathematics-related experiences.

Data Sources
I present examples drawn from students’ curations of self and mathematics in a 3rd year pre-service elementary mathematics methods course. Data were collected using Google slides as the curating platform for autobiographical reflections.

Results
Deliberate attention to the curating of experiences of learning and teaching develops awareness of changes in I/identity as an assemblage of networked systems of belief, affect, knowledge, cognition, and marked somatic experiences/encounters. The metaphor of curation to understanding identity provides recognition of the incompleteness of information one always has about self and other.

Scholarly Significance
Conceptualizing I/identity as curation offers a means to resolve the current psychology-sociology dichotomy and focuses attention on what the individual and the observer say they ‘care’ about thus opening up neglected dialogical questions of values, ethics, equity, and why these are selected. New metaphors and analogies such as I/identity as a networked assemblage, 2D-fluid, information, and trickster offer opportunities for productive ways to think about, research, represent, and work with identity as a transphenomenonal construct.

Author

• Steven Khan, University of Alberta