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Crossing Disciplinary Borders in Pre-service Teacher Education: Historical Consciousness as a Tool to Develop Awareness of Mathematical Positionality to Achieve Epistemic Change

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Borders in Mathematics Pre-Service Teacher Education

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Abstract

In recent decades, school reform efforts have reconceptualized what it means to teach mathematics – towards supporting students to develop greater action and autonomy as mathematical thinkers by engaging in mathematical reasoning and argumentation. Making this shift can require that teachers change their epistemic beliefs about what it means to participate in mathematics by engaging in and transforming their epistemic cognition. In this chapter, we use historical consciousness as a framework to present an approach to support mathematics pre-service teachers in navigating this epistemic change. We draw upon Zanazanian’s (2015, 2019) conceptualization of historical consciousness as rooted in human action (intention/decision making) – as a way of thinking about one’s position in relation to change in time (past, present, future) and as situated in broader social and cultural understandings and contexts. We present a hypothetical example – multi-digit multiplication – to illustrate a three-phase process for using historical consciousness within mathematics teacher education courses. In addition to using historical consciousness as a framework, the design of this process is further informed by a set of considerations grounded in the literature on integrating history in mathematics teacher education. Our approach highlights how historical consciousness can be used as a reflexive tool to help pre-service teachers take critical distance from their knowledge claims when making statements about the world in order to gain awareness of their positionality in relation to their epistemic cognition. Our guiding assumption is that once pre-service teachers gain awareness of their positionality, they may gradually achieve epistemic change over longer periods of time through sustained reflexive self-analysis. This chapter illustrates how crossing disciplinary borders has the potential to support pre-service teachers in re-shaping what they come to value as mathematical.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Marta Kobiela & Paul Zanazanian

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  1. Marta Kobiela
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  2. Paul Zanazanian
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Correspondence to Marta Kobiela .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA

    Nenad Radakovic

  2. Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Limin Jao

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Kobiela, M., Zanazanian, P. (2020). Crossing Disciplinary Borders in Pre-service Teacher Education: Historical Consciousness as a Tool to Develop Awareness of Mathematical Positionality to Achieve Epistemic Change. In: Radakovic, N., Jao, L. (eds) Borders in Mathematics Pre-Service Teacher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44292-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44292-7_3

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