- Title
- The emergence and expression of teachers’ identities in teaching foundation phase mathematics
- Creator
- Westaway, Lise
- ThesisAdvisor
- Graven, Mellony
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Doctoral
- Type
- PhD
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/7000
- Identifier
- vital:21208
- Description
- The assertion that learner performance in South African schools is in crisis may be cliched but it is certainly true. The majority of learners in the schooling system are not achieving the required outcomes, particularly in language and mathematics. I use the underperformance of learners in mathematics as the impetus for my research which seeks to understand how teachers’ identities emerge and are expressed in teaching Foundation Phase mathematics. The research contributes to an emerging scholarship that strives to explain underperformance and quality in mathematics classrooms beyond structuralist theorising. Recently research, particularly in South Africa, has begun to look more closely at who the teacher is and how the teacher is key in understanding what happens in the mathematics classroom. This emerging scholarship focuses on teacher identities. Research that foregrounds teacher identities within the field of mathematics education tends to be situated within a social constructionist orientation, which assumes that our knowledge of self and the world comes from our interactions with people and not some ‘objective’ reality (Berger & Luckman, 1966). Such a perspective appears to conflate questions of how we know something with what is. In other words, it elides structure and agency, thereby making research that seeks to examine the interplay between the two in the formation and expression of teachers’ identities, practically impossible. It is for this reason, as well as the need to move beyond the hermeneutic, that my research draws on Margaret Archer’s (1995, 1996, 2000) social realist framework. Social realism posits a relativist epistemology but a realist ontology. It is underpinned by the notion of a stratified reality with structural mechanisms giving rise to events in the world whether we experience them or not. It is only through the (inter)actions of persons that such mechanisms have the tendential power to constrain or enable the projects of persons. As such, my research seeks to identify the structural and agential mechanisms that give rise to teachers’ identities and how these identities are expressed in teaching Foundation Phase mathematics. In my research, teacher identity refers to the manner in which teachers express their social roles as teachers. In the research I use a case study methodology. I provide rich data on four isiXhosa teachers teaching in low socio-economic status schools. This data is gleaned through interviews and classroom based observations which were recorded as field notes and video transcripts. Analysis of the data occurs through the thought processes of abduction and retroduction (Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 2002). These thought process enable me to (re)describe and (re)contextualise the object of study. Through the process of asking transfactual questions I identify the structural, cultural and agential mechanisms giving rise to teachers’ identities and their expression in teaching foundation phase mathematics. There are three significant findings in my research. Firstly, research that attempts to understand the emergence and expression of teacher identities should consider their broad contextual realities. The historical, economic, social and political contexts in which the teachers are born and live, influences their sense of self, personal identities and social identities (teacher identities) and as such, influences their decision to become teachers and how they express their roles as teachers of Foundation Phase mathematics. Secondly, my research suggests that teachers’ mode of reflexivity is key to understanding the decisions that they make in the classroom and how they deal with the structures that condition the manner in which they express their roles as teachers. Thirdly, collective agency is necessary to bring about change in the way in which teachers express their roles in teaching Foundation Phase mathematics. My research produces new knowledge by examining the interplay of structure, culture and agency in the constitution of foundation phase teachers’ identities and their expression in teaching foundation phase mathematics. I use a social realist orientation to examine this interplay and provide an understanding of the mechanisms giving rise to the phenomenon under consideration. In this way I contribute to the extensive research on learner underperformance by focusing more explicitly on who the teacher is in the classroom.
- Format
- 363 leaves, pdf
- Publisher
- Rhodes University, Faculty of Education, Education
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Westaway, Lise
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