Repositioning Ourselves: acknowledging contradiction

Abstract

The essence of this paper is to present a self-study that resulted in the awareness of discrepancies that existed between our beliefs and practices as teacher educators and educational researchers. On the one hand, we assessed the impact of our teaching on participants of a professional development program. We analyzed the participants' abilities to explore student voices as input for improving the teaching of mathematics. On the other hand, as we categorized and characterized our participants' reflections using the tools of qualitative inquiry, the end effect was to distort and even silence those voices as an input for improving our own instruction, denying participants both agency and identity. This presented us with a living contradiction since this stance conflicted with our belief that learners deserve both agency and identity.