Moving beyond reflection and toward disruption in the post-field context of mathematics teacher education

Abstract

Prospective teachers bring countless stories of success and failure from different mathematics classrooms to their post-field teacher education courses. These reflective stories often glorify school mathematics classrooms and dominant traditions within, instead of confronting the marginalization of diverse groups in school environments. Mathematics teacher educators have a significant role to play in teaching prospective teachers to reflect critically on their field experiences and, in doing so, create spaces for disruption and disruptive pedagogies. Drawing on critical and equity-based theories applied within the fields of mathematics education and teacher education research, we propose a disruptive pedagogy analytical framework that enables us to study the roles and practices of mathematics teacher educators as they conduct their work in these post-field contexts of teacher education. In this paper, we introduce our disruptive pedagogy framework and present the results that followed from using it to analyze data from a research study in which mathematics teacher educators from across Canada and Norway were interviewed. We claim that our analytical framework can be used to identify those disruptive and transformative practices initiated by mathematics teacher educators—practices that are necessary to bring about shifts in inequitable and unjust classroom practices of school mathematics and in becoming a teacher. Unfortunately, however, results reported here point to the need for further shifts and growth toward more explicitly disruptive practices initiated by mathematics teacher educators in the post-field context.