Comforting Narratives of Compliance: Psychoanalytic perspectives on new teacher responses to mathematics policy reform

Despite a history of ambivalence towards the subject of mathematics, a recent study shows that many trainee primary school teachers did not continue to present themselves as mathematical failures once they had become teachers. This chapter considers some psychoanalytical aspects of that recent U.K. study, with a focus on the trainee teachers as they progress through university into their first year of teaching mathematics in primary schools. The research set out to investigate the ways in which such non-specialist students conceptualised mathematics and its teaching and how their views evolved as they progressed through an initial training course. The study suggests that trainee accounts of themselves are produced at the intersection of their personal aspirations of what it is to be a teacher and the external demands they encounter en route to formal accreditation.