How Mathematics Teacher Educators Become Researchers of Teaching

Abstract

This study is part of a set of investigations that focus on professionals who work in the education of teachers in order to understand their need to acquire new types of experience and knowledge when they assume the position of teacher educators. In this paper, we present an interpretation of how Mathematics teacher educators become researchers of teaching through the trajectories of their lives and education. The study was developed according to the principles of narrative inquiry. Data were produced from dialogical in-depth interviews, with a biographical-narrative aspect, carried out individually with six participants, Higher Education professors who, in their work, are committed to the education of Mathematics teachers and to teaching, from which they carry out their investigations and produce knowledge-of-practice. The analytic-interpretative process, through proper narrative analysis, sought to establish an understanding of the participants' professional development experiences. The results indicate that the teacher educators have established expertise concerning research, which is not limited to investigation in the traditional academic sense, since it takes place in their dialogue with teaching—their own and that of other teachers—both in Mathematics teaching and in the education of teachers who work in the teaching of this subject. The teachers have become researchers of teaching, producing knowledge of the practices of teaching Mathematics and training teachers.