HOW MATHEMATICS TEACHER EDUCATORS BECOME RESEARCHERS OF TEACHING

Abstract

This study is part of a series of investigations focusing on the professionals working with teacher education to understand their need to acquire new kinds of experience and of knowledge when they assume the role of educators. This article presents an interpretation of how Mathematics teacher educators become researchers of teaching based on their life and education trajectories. The study was developed according to the premises of narrative inquiry. The data was produced from in-depth dialogical interviews with a biographical-narrative aspect conducted individually with six participants who are Higher Education professors working with the education of Mathematics teachers and who are committed to teacher education and to teaching—topics forming the basis from which these professors perform their research and produce knowledge-of-practice. The analytical-interpretative process, by means of narrative analysis, aimed to establish an understanding of the participants’ professional development experiences. Results indicate that the educators developed an expertise regarding research not limited to investigation in the traditional academic sense, because it happens in the dialogue established with the act teaching—performed either by themselves or by others—both in teaching Mathematics directly and in the education of teachers who work with this subject. The educators constituted themselves as researchers of teaching producing knowledge-of-practice of teaching Mathematics and of educating teachers.