'I'm not a “maths-person”!' Reconstituting mathematical subjectivities in aesthetic teaching practices

摘要

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students' attitudes towards maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10-week alternative maths course. The investigated course adopts a feminist post-structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative mathematics. The data used include the memoryarrative writings and process-writings of 75 female teacher-education students, collected from three different cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.