Drawing the Wound: A Self-Study of Visual Modeling and Continued Becoming an Elementary Mathematics Teacher Educator

Each of the writers of this manuscript came to this work because of our past experiences as students, teachers, and as Mathematics Teacher Educators (MTEs). Loughran (2004), a self-study methodologist, describes research on teaching as inherently intertwined, noting that “as one alters so does the other, so the traditional notion of research whereby holding the problem in place while it is researched is not so straightforward in self-study” (p. 841). This fluidity reflects how self-study methodologies capture the evolving learning of the researcher. This manuscript is in a sense a methods paper, documenting our inquiry, but necessarily remains very personal, showing how our stories and emotions propelled the process of inquiry. In our dialogical collaborative inquiry, we began with a self-study approach that allowed us to closely examine our own teaching and decision-making in elementary math methods classes. As our questions developed, our methodology expanded to include quantitative data and qualitative case study methods. Guided by the rehumanizing mathematics perspective, we conceptualize elementary pre-service teachers’ struggles not simply as misconceptions or resistance, but as mathematical wounds, embodied, emotional, and historically situated injuries shaped by prior schooling, interpersonal messages, and structural features of mathematics education. In our research, we selected methodological tools progressively as we sought to surface and examine our hidden cognitions – the truths which shaped our individual pedagogies. Our goal was to make our private or hidden sense-making public by engaging ourselves, our students, and fellow MTEs in shared reflection on a problem of practice. This paper focuses on Karie’s evolving journey and understanding as we collaboratively worked to better understand elementary pre-service teachers’ (EPSTs’) struggles and how we might better support them. Throughout this iterative process, we made sense together while also incorporating insights from other MTEs, EPSTs, and existing research on result-oriented mathematics teacher education, as we attempted to “hold the problem in place.”