Official pedagogic identities from South African policy – some implications for mathematics teacher education practice

Abstract

In South Africa the National Curriculum Statement for Grades 10 – 12 (General): Mathematics (DoE, 2003) together with the Norms and Standards for Educators (DoE, 2000a) are key policy documents that provide the official basis for mathematics education reform and for the construction of new pedagogic identities. In this paper I use a framework based on the work of Bernstein (1996, 2000) to theorise the construction of pedagogic identities. I use this to build on Graven’s (2002) description of the new official pedagogic identity of the South African mathematics teacher, and on Adler et al. (2002) and others to raise questions related to teacher knowledge and the challenges of developing specialist mathematics teacher identities through initial teacher education programmes.