PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Examining the role of a secondary teacher’s image of instructional constraints on his enacted subject matter knowledge
Page: 430
I present the results of a study designed to determine if there were incongruities between a secondary teacher’s mathematical knowledge and the mathematical knowledge he leveraged in the context of teaching, and if so, to ascertain how the teacher’s enacted subject matter knowledge was conditioned by his conscious responses to the circumstances he appraised as constraints on his practice. To address this focus, I conducted three semi-structured clinical interviews that elicited the teacher’s rationale for instructional occasions in which the mathematical ways of understanding he conveyed in his teaching differed from the ways of understanding he demonstrated during a series of task-based clinical interviews. My analysis revealed that that the occasions in which the teacher conveyed/demonstrated inconsistent ways of understanding were not occasioned by his reacting to instructional constraints, but were instead a consequence of his unawareness of the mental activity involved in constructing particular ways of understanding mathematical ideas.