PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Personification as a lens into relationships with mathematics
Page: 1484
Personification is the attribution of human qualities to non-human entities (Inagaki & Hatano, 1987). Eliciting personification as a research method takes advantage of a naturally occurring means through which (some) people discuss the nuanced emotional relationships they have with those entities. In this paper, we introduce the eliciting personification method for exploring individuals’ images of mathematics, as well as discuss an initial set of approaches for analyzing the resulting data. Data from both pre-service teachers and research mathematicians are discussed in order to illustrate the method.