ELEMENTARY PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICS: AN EXPLANATORY PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY

Abstract

Recently, there has been a resurgence of an effort to understand the nature of mathematics and what the construct means for mathematics education as a field and educators. Underlying teachers’ understandings of the mathematics they teach are their conceptions of the nature of mathematics, and these conceptions provide a basis for the teacher’s espoused and enacted models for teaching and learning mathematics. This explanatory phenomenological study sought to answer the following questions: What are prospective elementary teachers’ conceptions of the nature of mathematics?; How do the lived experiences of the elementary prospective teachers inform their conceptions of the nature of mathematics?; and What are the connections, if any, to prospective teachers’ conceptions of the nature of mathematics and the Proposed Unified View? The results of this study revealed that (1) elementary prospective teachers viewed the nature of mathematics as a static-unified body of knowledge, but did not acknowledge mathematics as a discipline, (2) experiences with elementary prospective teachers’ former teachers were most influential in forming their conceptions about the nature of mathematics, and (3) when presented with the Proposed Unified View of the nature of mathematics, prospective teachers experienced a dissonance in how they were expected to learn and how they wanted to teach mathematics.