[Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity

[Anna Chronaki]

Dear Ng,
I think you are raising a very important not only epistemological, but also
ontological, issue concerning how we go about researching 'identity' and
especially 'learning identity' in mathematics education practices. It is
something that I have also puzzled with in my research, partly because I
have been involved in doing research with young children (I work in an early
childhood department) and partly because I work with individuals/communities
of the so-called marginalized groups and specifically with a Roma (or Gypsy
or Chicano) community where people are not literate in terms of 'formal'
mathematical genres and thus the stories they narrate about their personal
trajectories demand that the researcher gets deeper from what the 'words'
might seem to say. Attending only the narrative seems certainly not enough
as you say, but in a way and sometimes seems to complement the
'performative' -what actually people try to do (or try to say) as they try
to 'become' something. However, I have noticed that the
narrative/performative dialectic also comes in when we try to account on
gendered dimensions of 'identity'. But still the whole lot, although there
are many attempts to construct terms - and define them well so that to
operationalise their use with data, seems an unfinished process. A process
that definitely demands to approach the 'research' itself as an unfinished
text - a text that requires a different interpretation of our analysed data
and of our relation to our data.
I include here references for a few published articles. [I am not sure that
the system allows me to attach pdfs -so, if you cannot find them easily get
in touch with me directly].

1. Anna Chronaki. 2004.“Learning about 'learning identities" in the school
arithmetic practice: The experience of two young minority Gypsy girls in the
Greek context of education". In the European Journal of Psychology of
Education: Special Issue on “The Social Mediation of Learning in Multiethnic
Classrooms” Guest Editors: Guida de Abreu and Ed Elbers. Vol. XX, no 1,
61-74.

2. Anna Chronaki. (2008). An Entry to Dialogicality in the Maths Classroom:
Encouraging Hybrid Learning Identities In M. César and K. Kumpulainen (eds.)
Social Interactions in Multicultural Settings. Sense Publishers press (pp.
117-144).

3.Anna Chronaki. (in press). Troubling Essentialist identities: Performative
mathematics and the politics of possibility. In M. Kontopodis, Ch. Wulf and
B. Fichtner (eds). Children, Culture, Education: Cultural, Historical and
Anthropological perspectives. New York: Springer Series: International
Perspectives on Early Childhood Education.

All the best for your research!
Regards,
Anna.


-----Original Message-----
From: maths-education-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:maths-education-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ng Foo
Keong
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2010 6:00 PM
To: maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity

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hi everybody,

thanks to everybody for your inputs.

another big problem i have is my data and methodology.  i
conducted over 10 interviews for each of my four cases (all
adult pre-service teachers) over a year.  i also tried to take
pictures of their artifacts, and some of their lesson plans to
"corroborate" some of what they say, however, each person
could/would volunteer different sets of things.  the only
thing i have in common across all my four cases are the
interview data  -- the volunteers' self-accounts.

i do not have a hold over my volunteers.  for obvious reasons
i cannot put a gun at them and say "give me all your artifacts".
even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to give me things
like their mathematical workbooks from primary school etc
as these would have been thrown away.  all these make my
research extremely difficult.

can i still adopt a "narrative approach" (a la Sfard) to identity?
are there non-narrative approaches?  can i make any claims
based only on volunteers' stories about their (formal and
informal) mathematical learning experiences?

there are many nuggets in the data, i believe, that can
contribute to a theory of identity (especially from non-mathematical
daily life activities and other fields).  the problem is whether
oral accounts alone are acceptable.  if not, is there a way out of
this conundrum i myself in?

thanks and regards,
Ng, F.K.
PhD student, Singapore