The Expression of Teacher Identities in Grade 3 Mathematics Teaching in South Africa and Implications for Learner Identities

• In Event: Venturing the Terrains of Mathematical Identities: Theoretical Perspectives on Participation and Inclusion in Mathematics Education

Abstract

Purpose
Post 1994 there have been major curriculum changes to support social transformation and new ways of learning and being in South African classrooms. Curriculum changes sought to bring about four different orientations of school mathematics. Mathematics should promote critical democratic citizenship, have utilitarian value, enable children to mathematize and develop the knowledge and skills they were expected to learn (Author 2). We show how related post-apartheid systemic roles for teachers are in contradictory tension with their experiences of learning and teaching under apartheid. We illuminate how this situational logic of contradiction (Archer, 1995) is managed as the complementarity and continuity between teachers’ beliefs and old systemic roles.

Theoretical framework
Archer’s (1995) Morphogenetic Approach provides the analytic and explanatory tools for the research. This provides a framework for identifying the structural and cultural mechanisms at work, and for explaining how teachers are able to ‘act back’ on these mechanisms. It enables an examination of the interplay between structure, culture and agency in the emergence of teachers’ identities and the expression thereof in teaching mathematics.

Methods and Data Sources
Life-history, mathematics-history and practice-related interviews, together with observations in four Grade 3 teachers’ classrooms generated the research data. Four schools were purposefully selected as representative of schools in the Eastern Cape Province. These schools were situated in low socio-economic communities where the language of learning and teaching is the dominant indigenous language in the province. In analysing and interpreting the data, inductive reasoning, abduction and retroduction (Danermark et al. 2002) were utilised. These assisted us to identify the mechanisms that enable and/or constrain teachers’ identities in teaching mathematics.

Results
A clear finding of this research is that the teachers maintained the status quo in most respects. The new orientation to mathematics and systemic roles of teachers are at variance the systemic roles that the four teachers experienced as learners, during their initial teacher education and as young teachers. The overriding teacher response to this tension is to ‘hold onto’ the pre-1994 roles. These roles stand in contradiction with the post-1994 systemic roles. The teacher data illuminate the ways in which these systemic roles (i.e. the structural mechanisms) and beliefs (i.e. cultural mechanisms) have conditioned the teachers’ identities into the present. The paper explains how the roles of the past exist in necessary and logical relation with the beliefs of that period, generating a situational logic of protection (Archer, 1995) of pre-1994 roles.

Scholarly significance
This research contributes to the production of new knowledge in three ways. Firstly, it examines the structural, cultural and agential conditions that constrain and enable Grade 3 teachers’ identities and the expression thereof through the teaching of mathematics. Secondly, it uses a social realist lens to examine these conditions. Thirdly, by examining how teachers’ identities play out in the classroom it suggests that the emergence of learner identities is conditioned by the nature and character of teacher identities.

Authors

• Lise Westaway, Rhodes University

• Mellony Graven, Rhodes University