[Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity

[Ng Foo Keong]

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