On the making of a new mathematics teacher: professional development, subjectivation, and resistance to change

Abstract

Reform-based discourses in mathematics education have fabricated different subjectivities for teachers such as the Btraditional^ and the Bnew^ teacher. Professional development programs are proposed as effective mechanisms to fabricate the Bnew^ teacher. However, this teacher has proved hard to produce. Thus, the Bresistor^ teacher has emerged into the field as a way to explain failure within school mathematics reform. In this article, I assume that resistance is a consequential response against particular forms of subjectivation imposed on mathematics teachers. Using conceptual tools from Hall and Foucault, I explore the ways wherein a high school mathematics teacher reinvents meanings of being a mathematics teacher in the context of a professional development program aimed to implement problem-solving instruction. Against the myth of the resistor teacher unwilling to change, what emerges is a process of struggle over meaning. School mathematics reform, considered as an ideological event, becomes a site in which competing meanings about being a mathematics teacher are negotiated, contested, and resisted.