[Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity

[ruth topol]

... and if becoming a member of a community of practice has to do with being an outsider wanting to belong (and become), then it's about who's in and who's out - and what one was and what one's becoming.
 Is it really so hard to research?
 Couldn't  the focus be about learning in 2 contexts ... where one was and where one's going - and how one gets there and how one crosses the borders and boundaries to get there? (All much more than dragging cognitive stuff from 1 context to another as 'transfer')?? 

--- On Wed, 31/3/10, John Mason <jhmason27 at googlemail.com> wrote:

From: John Mason <jhmason27 at googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity
To: chronaki at uth.gr, "Mathematics Education discussion forum" <maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Date: Wednesday, 31 March, 2010, 12:33

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Coming from a phenomenological stance ... being interested in 'what it 
is like to be ...', it seems to me that if identity has any substance as 
a construct (I am doubtful) then it must be manifested as "I see myself 
as ..." with overtones of "I feel as though I belong, don't belong, am 
on the edge of things etc." The problem with researching the construct 
is that asking a direct question may create the phenomenon being 
investigated. Consequently indirect probes will be needed. I wonder if 
people's sense of community is sharpest when they feel excluded (for 
whatever reason, including a combination of their own insecurity and 
misreading other peoples' behaviour); belonging is often 'felt' as a 
sense of flow, of merging, of belonging which may not be articulated.

JohnM

On 31/3/10 10:26, Anna Chronaki wrote:
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> 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
>
>
>