The Negotiated Teacher: Student Mathematics Teachers’ Navigation of Conflicts and Tensions within the Overlapping Figured Worlds of School and University

Haniak-Cockerham, Fiona (2025) The Negotiated Teacher: Student Mathematics Teachers’ Navigation of Conflicts and Tensions within the Overlapping Figured Worlds of School and University. Doctoral thesis (EdD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the developing identities of a group of student-teachers following a university-led PGCE route into education. Schools are increasingly positioned in a global market as part of a neoliberal system in which education is seen as a commodity and trusted professionals are viewed as a technical workforce. This thesis questions to what extent student-teachers are able to be the teacher they want to be within this neoliberal context with its routine surveillance and performativity measures. This situation is particularly acute in mathematics education where pedagogic practice is heavily contested and the tension between university-based theory and school practice has a significant bearing on student-teachers’ experience of mathematics teaching. This thesis explores how student-teachers resolve these issues both internally and socially. The thesis follows the one-year post-graduate journey of four student-teachers to qualified teacher status: Kate, Niamh, Caroline and Jake. They were enrolled in the ‘university schools’ programme, a unique model of teacher education in which the university tutor (myself) was also immersed in the day-to-day experiences of the school and participated in the students’ co-planning of lessons, teaching observations and discussions. Data were collected throughout the year from a range of focus groups, semi-structured interviews and students’ reflections. Interview and focus group questions focused on their thoughts, emotions and conflicts concerning their developing pedagogy, as well as their relationships with each other, their university tutor and with their school mentors. The reflections were unstructured and were the stories that the student-teachers chose to tell me about their week, providing insight into their perceptions of the conflicts and tensions they experienced, how these were or were not resolved, and how they impacted their development. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain’s (1998) theory of ‘figured worlds’ is used as the theoretical lens for this research. This theory enables a reflection on the figured world of the university and how it interacts with that of the school and how this impacts the students’ development as mathematics teachers. The thesis explores how their figurative identities, based on their histories in person, as well as the relational (positional) identities shaped each student-teacher’s identity. Student-teachers experience a range of advice and feedback throughout their placements from school mentors, university tutors, their peers, pupils in class in addition to their own ideals and beliefs about teaching. The theoretical lens of figured worlds enables a focus on their orchestration of these multiple and often competing voices and explores how positioning and identifications are counterposed and brought to work against each other to create their own position and their own voice. Thus, my research question asks: How do student-teachers develop an authorial position across the figured worlds of the school and university? Sub-questions focus on how figures, voices and authoritative discourse impact on the students’ self-authoring, and their development of an internally persuasive discourse in response to the conflict between theory and practice which they experience in their PGCE year. The thesis concludes that student mathematics teachers must negotiate versions of the teacher they can be based on the teacher positions available to them. They are affected by the neoliberal context they find themselves teaching in, as well as their history-in-person and their shifting positional identities. This thesis explores the role of the conflicts and tensions student-teachers experience as a result of contested views of mathematics pedagogy which force them to question their beliefs about mathematics teaching. It focuses on the ways in which student-teachers develop an internally persuasive discourse and an authorial stance over time.