MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF PROFESSIONAL MASTER’S DEGREES

ABSTRACT: Nowadays, Professional Masters’ Degrees are important formative initiatives for teachers. This study reports results from an ongoing qualitative research project aiming at describing how participation in a Professional Master’s Degree contributes to the development of mathematics teachers’ professional identities. By adopting a socio-cultural perspective, we employed the notions of figured worlds and space of authoring as theoretical tools to analyze a Professional Master’s Degree and to develop an interpretative case study centered on André, a mathematics teacher who graduated from such program. The results reveal that the degree is a figured world focused mainly on disciplinary academic knowledge. André’s case reveals the difficulties experienced by the teacher when he tried to produce self-understandings about himself as a mathematics teacher articulating the voices and discourses coming from the master’s degree with those coming from his teaching practice.The results reveal that the studied professional master is a figurative world, concerned about developing teaching learnings centered in academic mathematics. André’s case shows some difficulties lived by the teacher when he tried to produce understandings about himself as a math teacher that articulate discourses and voices coming from the master with his own professional practice in school.