Building A 2nd floor, Room: Roberto Casas Auditorium - FACPYA

This presentation looks at the concept of identity. It has two purposes in mind. First, I emphasise theory: I set out to introduce a few ideas from the scholarly work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan whose ideas are not commonly drawn upon in mathematics education. The second purpose concerns the practical side of how those ideas might be useful. This aspect is given emphasis because many people working in mathematics education want to know what relevance these conceptual tools actually has for us.

Novel conceptualisations and new explanations about identity are far from new for mathematics education. The discipline as a long tradition of expanding its knowledge base and has a fine record of responsiveness to wider theoretical innovations. The ideas presented in this presentation continue that long tradition. We will use the ideas as a resource to stretch the mind as well as to capture the fluidity and complexity of identity construction.

The focus on identity will be applied to three contexts (i) the identity of students learning mathematics (ii) the identity of pre-service teachers learning to teach, and (iii) the identity of the researcher in the research process. In these applications Foucault’s ideas will be used to theorise how identity is produced and regulated in discourses involving relations of power. Lacan, on the other hand, will provide the grounding for understanding how power insinuates itself to make us what we are. Both approaches are helpful but as a complement the two together give us the tools and the language to get to the core of what identity is all about.