Issues with developing integrity in their practice (modeling the kind of mathematics teaching
they wished to promote) were also constantly brought to the fore during course discussions and
activities. Typical opening discussions during the seminar where students would share ‘how
things were going’ in their classes were filled with stories of struggles to enact what they
believed to be good teaching practices in a context that was not quite like the classrooms they
had left behind. The fact that their students were adult learners who did not appreciate being
treated as children (even if role playing), for example, was one such challenge to modeling the
kinds of practices they wanted their students to experience and adopt. Another was facing the
fact that they were now outsiders to what happens in real mathematics classrooms (they were no
longer practicing teachers, had not taught in this country, or had not taught at all) so using
examples of their own teaching did not always achieve the intended purpose. Another challenge
was to allow their teacher education students to take risks and make mistakes—which they
valued as a process for meaningful learning—when those mistakes involved real children.
Resisting the temptation to give into a pedagogy of ‘showing and telling’ turned out to be much
more challenging than any of them had expected. The following quote written by one of the
graduate students during the second half of the course reflects issues of credibility and integrity
the students experienced.
How do we create meaningful activities, engage in powerful and reflective dialogue,
and facilitate conversations if our personal contexts and those we teach in are so
different and all disconnected from the reality of specific classrooms and kids? Is
there a “better” way to construct teacher education? If so, how might this look?
Researching and Teaching: Looking for Connections and Balance
The challenge of developing an identity as a mathematics teacher educator is also a challenge
of learning to connect and balance the worlds of research and teaching and learning and to move
from the outside to the inside of (and between) these communities of practice. The students’
positioning as insiders or outsiders to either practice interacted with the course requirement to
conduct research in the context of their teaching. This brought to the fore tensions between
research and teaching in ways that typical work in doctoral courses do not.
Tensions between researching and teaching are widely documented in educational research
literature where disparate views about their relationship abound. Some say that educational
research does not speak to the concerns and interests of teachers (Atkin, 1992). Others observe
that educational research does not often seem to speak to academic researchers either (Eisner,
1984). There are those who see the two practices in competition with one another (Kline, 1977;
Wong, 1994) and those who claim the two are essential to one another (Wilson,1994).
Issues of connectedness and balance when conducting research in the context of their
teaching became explicit foci of conversations and preoccupations for the graduate students and
their instructors. Questions raised throughout the course in relation to these issues included: How
much emphasis and attention should be placed on teaching and how much on research projects?
Where do research questions come from: theory, practice, both? How are these kinds of
questions different or similar? Does research inform teaching? If so, in what ways? How can one
be both a believer and a skeptic of one’s teaching and what students are or are not learning?
Issues of connectedness between researching and teaching were experienced differently by
those who were and were not teaching during the course. These were evident in the kinds of
‘researchable questions’ the two groups of students posed, how much or how little their
questions changed over time, the extent to which their questions focused on exploring, assessing,
or changing their students’ thinking, in terms of the conclusions they reached about what the
students had or not learned in teacher education courses, and the value and usefulness they
attributed to teaching and research related activities of the practicum in teaching doctoral course.
Issues of balance between teaching and researching were also experienced differently,
although both groups (teaching/not teaching) spoke often of not letting their teaching and/or
research activities ‘take over their lives.’ Questions of balance were brought up for both groups
when they had to make a final commitment on what to study in this context when they
admittedly had many questions and wanted to learn as much as possible about teaching future
teachers. Questions were also raised by both groups about the expectation that they would devote
Convention