Pre-service mathematics teachers’ narrated failure: Stories of resilience

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.09.006Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Pre-service mathematics teachers’ narrated failure, identity and resilience are explored.

  • Mindset framework fruitfully brings together the constructs of failure, identity and resilience.

  • Self-expectations and goals are a key component of one’s subjective understanding of failure.

  • Rethinking and redefining self-expectations and goals is a strategy that leads to resilience.

  • The constructs of failure and failure resilience need a subjective approach to investigation.

Abstract

In educational research, failure has often been touched upon as a by-product, but rarely has failure been investigated without attempting to find ways around it instead of attempting to simply understand it better. This paper provides insight into a pilot study on understanding math failure through narrative. I analyse two pre-service mathematics teachers’ narratives about failure and identity in order to illustrate their personal understandings of their own failures. The analysed stories provide insight into the subjects and their failure resilience, and initiate a discussion on subjective understanding of resilience. These stories also illustrate the need to further research regarding the subjective understandings of failure in general and in math specifically.

Keywords

Failure
Identity
Mathematics
Mindset
Narrative
Resilience

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