From Preservice Mathematics Teacher Education to Beginning Teaching: A Study in Recontextualizing

This article describes a two-year longitudinal study that tracked seven students through a one-year, full-time, university-based secondary mathematics method course and into their first year of teaching in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The purpose of the study was to describe the recontextualizing from the mathematics method course by these beginning teachers. Qualitative analysis of the teacher education course, of students' positioning in relation to this course, and later of their positioning in relation to teachers and learners in schools, was conducted. The results showed that beginning teachers drew in two ways from the method course: they reproduced a small number of discrete tasks that had been introduced to them there, and they also deployed a professional argot--a way of talking about teaching and learning mathematics. This recontextualizing was shaped by the beginning teachers' educational biographies and school contexts, but most particularly by access to recognition and realization rules.