Mathematics pedagogy in the poststructural moment: A rhizomatic analysis of the ethos of secondary mathematics teaching in an urban setting

This ten-week ethnographic research deals with the structure of complexity of four secondary mathematics teachers' work and lives in an urban setting. It is argued that a mathematics teacher's work and culture, in general and in its multiplexity, is wed to a plurality of competing factors and changing contexts that redound from the various contradictions, conflicts, assimilated contraries, and double binds that a teacher negotiates daily. Provisional findings and interpretive analyses were obtained through interviews, document analysis, survey and grounded questionnaires, persistent observations, and the rhizomatic attitude of working not for or with the teachers but "between" them.;Two research questions were investigated: (1) What does it mean to teach high school mathematics in an urban setting at the present time? (2) To what extent do pedagogical practices subjectify students into a way of thinking about/acting/doing mathematics in the classrooms?;The methodological framework employed is poststructural ethnography in that it seeks a critical ontology of "how things are," problematizing the acritical status quo of everyday ideas in the current regime of mathematics pedagogy. The innocence of mathematics teaching is problematized. Recent reform rhetorics including the rhetoric of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards with its promise of utopia and the rhetoric of meaningful (and authentic) learning of mathematics in the constructivist movement are (re)assessed vis-a-vis the constraints of urban mathematics teaching.;Underlying the theoretical position that is pursued in this work is Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. The rhizomatic framework has a teacher's regime of truth disjunctively synthesized with many factors such as the social context of teaching, her/his personal epistemologies, beliefs and practices, the (implicit) meta-revolutionary changes in school mathematics, and poststructural readings of the discourse of mathematics teaching.;Findings of this study include: (1) the social context serves as a mediating difference between a mathematics teacher's espoused and enacted theories and beliefs; (2) there exists a "gendered" deployment of school mathematics teaching based on relational and impersonal modes of epistemology; (3) teachers with few or narrow meaningful mathematical experiences tend to constrain the meaningfulness of learning and teaching; (4) teachers' low clientele perception leads to the underestimation of their students' mathematical power and needs; (5) a conflict seems to exist between the ethos of mathematics teaching and the "new" ethos of schooling; (6) patterns of absenteeism make it extremely difficult for teachers to implement curriculum innovation, and; (7) teachers tend to develop a sense of isolation. The study also includes ways in which a student's math subjectivity is constructed through a Foucauldian genealogy of the deployment of mathematics teaching.