This article focuses on the methodological use of reflective narratives from discourses and activities of an experienced primary teacher as evidence of her professional identity. The teacher's reflective narratives emerge from her participation in a 3-year developmental and research project, Learning Communities in Mathematics, conducted at the University of Agder (UiA) in Norway. As background for our study, we firstly present the teacher in action with her sixth-grade pupils in a mathematics lesson, and then analyse selected clusters of reflective narratives from different empirical situations in the project. We have identified four identity indicators, which have been elaborated and organised thematically, related to the teacher's engagement and critical alignment in the community of participants: (1) Positioning in relation to pupils, (2) Reflecting on developing a workshop model in teaching, (3) Integrating and expanding models of teaching and (4) Challenging positioning in relation to didacticians. These indicators provide evidence of the teacher's professional identity. We suggest that the emergence of these indicators also gives empirical evidence of professional teacher identity development.Keywords Professional mathematics teacher identity Á Social theory of learning Á Narrative approach Á Reflective narrative Á Identity indicator In recent years, identity has received the attention of researchers from a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches in social and human sciences. The growing
This article aims to identify the mathematical reasoning strategies expressed through gestures and speech used by two groups of sixth-grade pupils when solving a task related to the transition between two semiotic representations: figure and Cartesian diagram. The article also identifies the difficulties the pupils meet in the solution process. The analyses of the group dialogues focus particularly on the gesture dimension of deixis. The pupils in both groups have used the following deictic gestures: pointing, held-point, linear point-slide, and circular point-slide in their solution process, while repeated pointing has been identified only in one of the groups. These pointing gestures are related to the reasoning strategies: comparison of persons in the figure, coordination of two dimensions in the diagram, recapitulation and going to an extreme location. The pupils use the modalities of speech, gesture, and writing in order to solve the mathematical task. Their pointing gestures related to their use of reasoning strategies play a multifaceted role in developing collaborative mathematical reasoning in the two small groups.In recent years there has been a growing interest among researchers in mathematics education in gestures as an important function of communication and reasoning in Special thanks are due to our colleague Espen Daland at UiA for filming the school lesson and to the teacher for giving us the opportunity to analyse the video-clip from her lesson. We would also like to thank Laurie D. Edwards for fruitful discussions that stimulated us to focus on the topic of gestures.Correspondence should be sent to Raymond Bjuland,
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