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“To Tia with love”: Chilean mathematics teacher identities after professional development

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Abstract

It is not easy for teachers to re-author their professional identities to incorporate change after participation in professional development (PD). In this article, we seek to understand Chilean teachers’ collective identity performances after PD into collaborative problem-solving mathematics. We undertook a classical thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews held with 10 primary school teachers 18 months after their participation in PD. We present an innovative report of our findings by combining the interview analysis into a movie synopsis and creating a fictional protagonist, Tia (‘aunty’ in Spanish), who represents the common findings from the ten teachers. We found the attractive identities performed by teachers, in particular the ‘mother-saviour’ and the ‘successful’ teacher, conflicted with their understandings of the teacher role promoted by PD. We argue the unique method of combining data allowed for reporting findings with both breadth and depth and this enabled us to see the way in which identities are culturally and contextually produced. We suggest PD needs to cater to these attractive teacher identities in order to be successful and sustainable in the long term.

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Notes

  1. Ganas is a Spanish word referring to desire or motivation to do something.

  2. Curling is a sport similar to bowls, played on ice. Two members of the team sweep the ice to influence the path of the stone, thrown by another team member.

  3. Statistics from Ministry of education available at: http://junarsemantics.s3.amazonaws.com/mineduc/BigData/Visualizaciones/VZ1/dist/index.html.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the following funding sources: CONICYT Proyectos Fondecyt Post-doctorado #3160469 and #3180291; PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project FB0003 (CIAE) and AFB170001 (CMM) and Unité Mixte Internationale UMI CNRS 2807.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Lisa Darragh

  2. Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Darinka Radovic

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  1. Lisa Darragh
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  2. Darinka Radovic
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Correspondence to Lisa Darragh.

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Darragh, L., Radovic, D. “To Tia with love”: Chilean mathematics teacher identities after professional development. ZDM Mathematics Education 51, 517–527 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-018-01023-7

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