Identity-Making in School Mathematics

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

Abstract

Perspectives
Scholars across educational fields have helped to develop our understanding of identity. It has shaped how we see ourselves as like others and as unique (Bishop, 2012). Two major expansions of the construct have added to its potential potency. As individuals inhabit and adapt to shifting landscapes and contexts, identity is seen to be contested (Dei, 2010) and fluid (Banks, 2006). As well, identity has increasingly been seen to be useful for explaining how different individuals position themselves differently within learning opportunities such as school mathematics (Cobb, Gresalfi, & Hodge, 2009; Sfard & Prusak, 2005). I use identity-making (Chickering & Reisser, 1993) to emphasize that students’ identities are evolving as a consequence of their actions in relation to their experience (McFeetors & Mason, 2005).


Purpose
This study will illustrate how identity-making as an interpretive construct casts light on individual students’ journeys through high school mathematics, making sense of their shifts in their intentions and approaches as mathematics students (Davis, 1996; Martin, 2009). I will share consequences and educational possibilities for using these findings in instructional design and beyond.

Method
The Trajectories Research Project (Mason & McFeetors, 2007) followed students for the last five years of their high school journey, focusing on their positioning and their choices as students of mathematics. Two or three interviews per person per year, supplemented by school achievement data and participants’ responses to online questionnaires, led to interpretations of students’ lived experiences as learners.

In the study reported here, the Trajectories data were revisited to explore the explanatory power of identity-making as an interpretive device. Interpretation involved the construction of individual narratives (Ward-Penny, Johnston-Wilder, & Lee, 2011) for different students (Clandinin, 2013).

Data Sources
The Trajectories study began with 100 participants, with more than 60 sustaining their involvement through the five years culminating in graduation. This study looked at the interactions and the interviewers of six participants regarding their reorientations to mathematics and school as they and their contexts changed.

Results
In all six cases, considering these life journeys through the lens of identity making highlighted different aspects of the participants’ experiences, all of whom described changes over time in their relationship with mathematics and school. No participants explicitly framed their experiences as identity-making. Yet the notion of identity-making brought to light how, over time, the study participants’ descriptions of what they were trying to do (and how and why) became distinctly personal and less dependent on the instruction their teachers were providing. The two most successful students shifted that discourse to what they were trying to become (and how and why), portraying themselves as more conscious of themselves as active makers of their identities (Borasi, 1992).

Scholarly Significance
Identity making helped explain how students are changed by reorienting themselves to the shifting contexts of school mathematics. I now align with other scholars (e.g., Baxter Magolda, 2001) that identity making is the personal project of every adolescent. There are extraordinary possibilities in expanding the construct’s role in education (Gresalfi & Cobb, 2011, Roschelle, 2008).

Author

• Ralph T. Mason, University of Manitoba