An Unlikely Alliance: Mathematics Education, Poststructuralism and Potential Affirmation

Abstract

This paper engages current poststructural debates over knowledge and subjectivity for a discussion on teacher education. In doing so it takes seriously the claim that what we have come to know as teaching practice is now profoundly undermined by social theories of the postmodern. The task that it sets itself is to reinterpret the role of the teacher educator in such a way that this new form might confront the challenge that postmodemism has posed. It does this by exploring how 'modern' assumptions have shaped the self-understanding in terms of which many educators make sense of their work. Drawing on the philosophy of Foucault it then critiques these ideas and works to reconstruct them in order to meet the challenge posed by postmodernism.