Constructivist Practice in Preservice Teacher Education in Mathematics: (re)producing and affirming the status quo?

Abstract

Teacher educators often tend to place enormous faith in constructivist approaches to teaching, which emphasise collaboration, inquiry and problem solving. With reference to my own pedagogical practices in preservice teacher education, I argue that constructivist practice may in fact cement, rather than challenge, the taken‐for‐granted cultural, sexist and racist assumptions informing teaching‐mathematics‐as‐usual. I suggest that students should experience a different mathematics; a mathematics that reveals how processes of collaboration and inquiry, based on constructed binaries, selectively constitute mathematical subjectivities. Preservice teachers and teacher educators who are aware of activities and practices which are overly regulatory and/or discriminatory might work together to re‐vision and enact an alternative mathematics: a mathematics able to challenge and disrupt the status quo.