Gender and Education

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‘I’m not a “maths‐person”!’ Reconstituting

mathematical subjectivities in aesthetic teaching
practices

Anna Palmer

To cite this article: Anna Palmer (2009) ‘I’m not a “maths‐person”!’ Reconstituting
mathematical subjectivities in aesthetic teaching practices, Gender and Education, 21:4,
387-404, DOI: 10.1080/09540250802467950

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Gender and Education
Vol. 21, No. 4, July 2009, 387–404

‘I’m not a “maths-person”!’ Reconstituting mathematical

subjectivities in aesthetic teaching practices
Anna Palmer*

Department of Education, Stockholm University, Sweden

(Received 26 May 2008; final version received 18 August 2008)
Taylor and Francis
CGEE_A_346963.sgm

Gender
10.1080/09540250802467950
0954-0253
Original
Taylor
02008
00
Dr.
anna.palmer@ped.su.se
000002008
AnnaPalmer
&
and
Article
Francis
(print)/1360-0516
Education (online)

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics

influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students’ attitudes towards
maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less
mathematical during a 10-week alternative maths course. The investigated course
adopts a feminist post-structural approach based on critical pedagogy and
deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative
mathematics. The data used include the memory/narrative writings and process-
writings of 75 female teacher-education students, collected from three different
cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the
maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more
positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed
that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical
subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.
Keywords: aesthetics; deconstruction; gender; mathematics; memories;
subjectivity

Introduction

I have a hard time understanding why I, who really hates mathematics, have to spend
almost a whole semester studying this very subject in teacher education. (Report No. 9,
2006)

Why are Early Childhood Education (ECE) students so reluctant to work with math-
ematics? In actual fact many students state that they actively choose a profession that
either avoids mathematics altogether or that avoids teaching mathematics in the way
they were taught the subject at school (Palmer 2007). Furthermore, only a handful of
these students identify themselves as ‘fairly’ mathematical or, as specifically referred
to in this study, as a ‘maths-person’. When meeting groups of mostly female students1
in my work as a teacher-educator, I often notice that the subject of mathematics
produces anxiety and tension in the classroom. When asked to make their attitudes,
notions and feelings in relation to the teaching and content of the maths course visible,
they describe how their ‘maths-anxieties’ often make them passive, resigned or uncer-
tain. Sometimes these feelings are so strong that they result in the student missing
classes due to ‘illness’ or even dropping out of the course altogether.

*Email: anna.palmer@ped.su.se

ISSN 0954-0253 print/ISSN 1360-0516 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09540250802467950
http://www.informaworld.com
388 A. Palmer

As a teacher-educator and researcher, I naturally wonder how I can help these

students to overcome their uncertainties and anxieties in relation to mathematics so
that they are able to teach mathematics to young children without transferring their
own ‘maths-anxieties’. In this study I challenge the ‘maths-person’ concept in an
attempt to deconstruct and reclaim its meaning and find new and/or alternative
definitions. I suggest that the meaning of being a ‘maths-person’ is not something that
one essentially is, as an inborn genetic trait, but rather something that one can become
through participation in social contexts such as ECE. An important part of my teach-
ing has therefore been to challenge essentialist understandings and help the students
to work towards understanding both their own and children’s subjectivities as multi-
ple, shifting, sometimes contradictory and in a state of change and as something
potential (Butler 1993, 1999; Davies 2000).
The aim of the study described in this paper is to investigate how alternative ways
of teaching mathematics influence and affect ECE students’ attitudes towards maths
and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during
aesthetic teaching practices in a 10-week alternative maths course.
The first part of the article contextualises the research project by first of all
giving a short overview of the Swedish political context of mathematics. In the
follow-on sections I describe the data collection of the study and outline the 10-week
course and its methods and present an example from one of the aesthetic/maths
workshops undertaken as part of the course. The second part of the article outlines
the methodology and theoretical framework of my study, and illustrates the analysis
with examples of the students’ narrative/process-writings selected from the data
collection. The paper concludes with a discussion section.

The political context of mathematics in Sweden

Mathematics is a highly disputed subject within the Swedish political agenda.
According to several national studies, interest in mathematics has decreased among
the Swedish population (Skolverket 2004). In a study from 2003 the subject of math-
ematics was ranked by the Swedish people as the most unpopular and uninteresting
subject in education (Skolverket 2003). According to an Official Investigation Report,
in comparison with countries like Finland, Japan and China, Swedish students do not
perform well in mathematics (Skolverket 2004). Interest is low and the results do not
come up to standard. In other words, in Sweden the subject of mathematics is in a
state of crisis.
This has led to the introduction of several measures by the Swedish state.
Several of these measures relate to teacher education and emphasise the importance
of mathematics in early childhood education (Swedish Government 2006). Since
2005 mathematics has been a compulsory subject in ECE and improving EC teacher
preparation is regarded as urgent. Students in ECE programmes are obliged to take
at least a 10-week full-time course in mathematics as part of their teacher education.
Furthermore, since 2005 universities all over the country have integrated more
mathematics in their ordinary ECE programmes. Stockholm University has also
arranged obligatory maths courses. As a supplement to these courses my colleagues
and I were able to organise an alternative maths course with a special emphasis on
ECE students’ understanding of their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical
and gendered attitudes towards maths. Like the other courses in the programme this
10-week maths course is obligatory and is integrated in a one-year long programme.
 Gender and Education 389

The data collection

The data used in this paper includes 150 memory/narrative stories written by 75
teacher-education students (from three different cohorts). Another set of data consists
of a total of 750 maths-related words or concepts that I asked the students to write and
share with each other at the very beginning of each course in order to discuss the
taken-for-granted notions that surfaced when hearing the word ‘mathematics’. My
source of data also included 75 reports written by the students during their course
work in which they describe their learning processes during this 10-week maths
course. These reports can be understood as a mixture of personal reflections/memo-
ries/field notes of vocational training and traditional academic writing. This alterna-
tive writing practice – or hybrid writing process – has been developed with the aim of
transgressing the theory–practice binary still prevalent in education and helping
students to relate their own personal (and gendered) experience to theories (Lenz
Taguchi, forthcoming). These 75 writing processes, the 150 narrative memory/narra-
tive stories and the collection of 750 words and concepts were collected during the
years 2005–7 and represent the main source of data in this study.2

A reconceptualised maths course

The maths course investigated in this research is part of a one-year ECE course called
‘Investigative Pedagogy – Dialogue Reggio Emilia’. The one-year course adopts a
feminist post-structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory
(Butler 1993, 1997, 1999; Davies 2000; Ellsworth 1989; Lenz Taguchi 2000, 2004a,
2006; Lather 1991, 2007). In the last five years approximately 120 students have partic-
ipated in this one-year course, which includes the reconceptualised 10-week maths
course designed with the specific aim of challenging students’ gendered attitudes to
mathematics and problematises the constitution and reconstitution of mathematical
subjectivity. The course draws on an investigative and interdisciplinary/aesthetic
approach to learning using pedagogical documentation that highlights children’s and
teachers’ learning processes (Lenz Taguchi 2000; Rinaldi 2006; Reggio Children
2005). As part of this particular course the students also take maths courses based on
lectures, work-sessions and literature studies in the field of Early Childhood Mathe-
matics in Sweden (Ahlberg 2000; Höines-Johnsen 2003; Doverborg and Pramling-
Samuelsson 1999).
The aim of this maths course is to work towards a transgression of central
modernist binaries such as theory/practice, science/art, mathematics/aesthetics and
mind/body that have dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment
(Hekman 1990; Davies 2000). In this approach the differences embedded in the
binaries are challenged towards a transgression and practice of ‘both-and’ (Lenz
Taguchi 2005, 245), or ‘going beyond’ (Lenz Taguchi, forthcoming). A ‘both-and’
learning situation can be understood as addressing both sides of these binaries
simultaneously and moving towards new ways of thinking beyond dichotomies
(Palmer 2008). An example of this is described in the next section of the paper and
deals with interdisciplinary work with music and mathematics in a workshop.
In this interdisciplinary and reconceptualised maths course students have an oppor-
tunity to cross disciplinary borders and work simultaneously with their bodies and
minds. In an investigative approach, mathematics is understood as a language among
other means of expressions, such as music, visual arts and dance. By working in
collaborative investigational workshops the students challenge their own experiences
390 A. Palmer

and memories of learning and doing mathematics.3 This work sets out to renegotiate
the limits of mathematics and work towards a refiguring of what constitutes the subject
of mathematics. Working deconstructively with mathematics and challenging the
taken-for-granted expectations and understandings of the subject also facilitate a
reconstitution of the students’ gendered subjectivities and attitudes in EC teacher
education.
The students taking the mathematics course in question also took part in investi-
gative work using music, rhythm, dance, movement and architecture as ‘languages’ or
ways of understanding and expressing mathematics through co-operative learning. In
ECE the aim of such workshops is to give the students an opportunity to understand
how to plan, carry out and evaluate aesthetic interdisciplinary investigative learning
situations with children in line with the directions stipulated by the Swedish National
Agency for Education (Skolverket 2006). A further aim, through aesthetic work with
mathematics, is to encourage students to challenge their dominant discourses and open
themselves to the possibility of reconstituting their mathematical subjectivities.
The workshop described in the next section is an example of investigative, inter-
disciplinary and aesthetic learning that influences ECE students’ understandings of
their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical. This work tries to transgress the
science/art dichotomy and in deconstructive terms moves beyond the separation of
mathematics and aesthetics towards a new interdisciplinary way of thinking about
mathematics (Lind 2004; Lenz Taguchi 2004b, 2005; Sinclair 2006; Sinclair, Pimm,
and Higginson 2006). The following example is taken from a one-day ECE music/
maths workshop led by two colleagues; a maths teacher and a music teacher.

Making music out of a room – an example from the course

One of the challenges that the students were given in the music/maths workshop was
to make music out of a room’s architecture. They were encouraged to find relationships
between design and mathematics and translate the architecture of a room into music
by using different musical instruments. The students worked in groups of five and each
group investigated a specific room: the foyer, the cafeteria, the hallway, the WC and
the music room. The groups discussed the architecture of the rooms in terms of
geometrical shapes, angles, lines on the walls, patterns on the ceiling, the structure of
the rug on the floor, the regularity of the placing of the windows, etc. They identified
lots of different architectural details that were specific to the room being investigated
and translated them into mathematical terms. The translations were not made in any
definite order, e.g. from architecture to mathematics, but at random in immediate, back
and forth, co-operative and communicative processes.
The students worked with mathematical concepts like circle, square, rectangle,
triangle, rhomb, distance, length and height, area and regularity (Ahlberg 2000;
Höines-Johnsen 2003; Doverborg and Pramling-Samuelsson 1999). All these
concepts could be used when making music, in that each architectural detail could be
first translated into a drawn mathematical symbol (agreed upon in the group) and then
into a specific musical sound. The circular lamp on the wall of the WC was trans-
formed into a drawn circle (as a symbol) on a large sheet of paper, and illustrated by
the sound of a tambourine. Even sounds in the room were turned into mathematical
symbols and music, such as the sound of running water in the wash-basin.
The students made large drawings, or schemes, of the rooms using the symbols
they had co-operatively agreed on in the group. The schemes became more and more
 Gender and Education 391

organised as the work progressed, as a motion towards mathematical abstraction and

generalisation (Ahlberg 2000). In the same way that a piece of music is constructed
by using different notes and sections (with exact values), these mathematical schemes
were organised into smaller pieces on the basis of regularity and rhythm (Rothstein
2006). In order to play the pieces of music together in the groups the students had to
feel the rhythm of the music in their bodies and count the beats contained in every
section of the musical schemes. Each music composition, drawn with the support of
the language of mathematics, had a specific character and rhythm that was connected
to the architecture of the rooms and the materiality of the things in them (Figure 1).
As Ernest suggests, the schemes could eventually be understood as semiotic
Figure 1.

systems with recurring intervals, regular rhythms and symbols that were possible to
denote by symbols such as a, x, or y (2008, 68). Each symbol was connected to an
architectural sign and a specific sound made by a particular instrument. With the
support of mathematics literature and the written and photographic documentation of
the event, the students were able to see that the drawn musical scores could be under-
stood as the first step of a systematic exploration of the properties of the real number
system that showed functional relationships (Ahlberg 2000).
This workshop is an example of ‘both-and’ teaching that challenges ‘taken for
granted’ expectations and understandings about mathematics (cf. Sinclair, Pimm, and
Higginson 2006). The students used a logical and objective discourse and an aesthetic
and communicative discourse simultaneously. In addition to exploring the milieus
with their bodies and understanding the relationships between mathematical, architec-
tural and aesthetical languages, they also worked with emotions, attitudes, beliefs and

Figure 1. Making music out of a room. Copyright: Stockholm University. Used with
permission.
392 A. Palmer

Figure 2. The group working with the foyer area. Copyright: Stockholm University. Used with
permission.

values in this learning process (Sinclair 2004). Figure 2 depicts the group working
with the foyer area. The following quotation is from one student’s process-writing:

We talked about mathematics. It’s in your body although we are not always aware of
that. Such a simple thing is that stairs need to have standardised measures of length
and height so that we don’t tumble when we walk the stairs. We don’t think about that
but the body remembers distances, gaps and spaces. It’s not only in our thinking that
we make generalisations and search for rules. The body needs regulations and classifi-
cations too. (Report No. 6, 2005)
Figure 2.

Theoretical framework
The constitution of subjectivities
In 2006 I decided to conduct a survey to investigate how ECE students regarded
themselves in relation to mathematics (Palmer 2007). The survey included open ques-
tions about feelings and emotions relating to everyday mathematical situations. The
result showed that the vast majority of students seemed to have a very essentialist
understanding of their mathematical subjectivities: as being either good or bad at
maths, liking it or not liking it, being mathematical or not being mathematical, etc. As
mentioned earlier in the paper, an important part of my teaching has consequently
been to challenge such essentialist understandings and encourage the students to work
towards understanding both children’s and their own subjectivities as shifting and
multiple (Butler 1993, 1997, 1999).
Constituting your subjectivity as, for instance, a ‘maths-person’, is a highly
gendered and contextual process. How you understand yourself and how you are
 Gender and Education 393

understood by people around you very much depends on the local situations you are
involved in, i.e. what is said and done, how you position your body in relation to other
bodies and how you relate to things in the room (Davies 2000). The constitution of
subjectivity can be understood as an effect of discursive practices (Butler 1999, 24).
In this perspective, discourses are not to be understood as something that is explicitly
said (as signifying a system of grammar, speech or conversation), but rather as
specific practices that enable or define what can be said and understood and that
produce meaning in a specific context (Barad 2008, 137).
The concept of materialisation used by Butler (1999) illustrates how our discur-
sively informed thinking transforms into embodied practices of moving, talking and
doing. The distinction between body and mind, thoughts and actions is dissolved
through the use of the concept of materialisation; our thoughts/memories are materia-
lised in the way we talk or behave, for example in mathematical learning practices,
which means that all our actions can be understood as materialised meaning. Butler
also uses the term performativity to illustrate how subjectivities are actually consti-
tuted through iterate bodily repetitions of materialised acts and movements in specific
discursive practices (Butler 1999, 179). A person materialises discourses by acting
and moving in particular cultural situations, which thus become performative of their
subjectivity. This means that their mathematical subjectivity is constituted through
various, iterate bodily gestures and talk in contexts in which mathematics is taught,
learned, commented on or dealt with in various ways, either individually or with
others.
The consequences of understanding mathematical subjectivity as discursive,
performative and materialised in the context of teaching and learning mathematics in
ECE include the possibility of displacing, playing around with, trying out new ways
or even altering performances and positionings. As shown in this paper, the alternative
maths course included in EC education at the Stockholm University aims to displace
textbook/teaching aid-dominated teaching practices in different ways and identify
alternative ways of doing mathematics that can help to facilitate a change in mathe-
matical subjectivities, attitudes and notions (Palmer 2007, 2008).

The masculinity of mathematics

Several studies have shown that mathematics is generally regarded as a masculine
subject (Mendick 2006; Walkerdine 1998; Ernest 2004; de Freitas 2008; Brandell et al.
2005). This idea of mathematics as masculine has been generated throughout the
history of Western Enlightenment thinking. Masculine controlled reason as opposed
to feminine disordered nature has for a long time been a productive pattern in feminist
analyses of power production within mathematics and science (Ernest 2004, 18;
Mendick 2006, 61; Walkerdine 1990, 1998). In this binary thinking, mathematics as a
cultural construction of the western world is aligned with masculinity and seen as an
opposite to femininity. This pattern of opposites can be expressed as: science/nature,
order/disorder and masculine/feminine. In a historical perspective, women were
considered as being closer to nature and more emotional. Consequently, women were
understood as unable to do mathematics in the same rational way as men (Walkerdine
1990).
However, it is vital that these polarised categories are not essentialised and
treated as oppositional, but are regarded as going beyond fixed end essentialising
ideas about the feminine and masculine to show how they overlap and shift (de
394 A. Palmer

Freitas 2008). In our work with students we have tried to understand mathematics
as a more co-operative and creative process (as in the aesthetic/maths workshop). In
trying this out within the research practice of the course, the goal has not been to
reverse the binary and only use strategies relating to what can be understood as the
feminine. Instead, our aim has been to dislocate nature/disorder/creativity from the
feminine and reason/logical thinking/science from the masculine in an attempt to
dislodge these stereotyped constructions. Once dislodged such constructions
become difficult to essentialise, in that taken-for-granted associations can no longer
be used. The maths course workshops can thus be seen as examples of situations
where deconstructions of the binary of feminine/masculine take place.

Methodological framework
Writing collective biographies as a combined teaching and research practice
For this research I have positioned myself as both a teacher and a researcher and
simultaneously used two methodological strategies for teaching and research: collec-
tive biography (Davies and Gannon 2006) and deconstructive strategies (Burman and
MacLure 2004). Narratives about mathematics were collected as teaching material
and data for my research throughout the entire course period, to be used as a tool in
collaboratively deconstructing students’ attitudes and mathematical subjectivities.
This work was inspired by collective biography work as developed by Bronwyn
Davies from the classical work of Frigga Haug (Davies 2000; Davies et al. 2001;
Davies and Gannon 2006). As a research practice, collective memory work constitutes
an alternative practice that integrates lived, embodied experience with theory that
challenges the more traditional, humanist forms of social research (Davies and
Gannon 2006).
The telling and writing of memories, or narrating a story, was conducted in small
groups. A collective writing process always starts with memories connected to a
subject that all the members of the group can relate to, in this case childhood experi-
ences of mathematics. After the initial introduction everyone writes about their own
memory. On meeting up again all the participants read her/his story out loud and the
group shares their written memories with each other. The participants are encouraged
to write their stories as carefully as they can and include lots of details, scents, move-
ments and other detailed information without explanations or clichés. Sharing one’s
story with the group often awakens new memories that help to collectively enrich and
develop all the different stories (Davies and Gannon 2006, 18). All the stories were
carefully discussed, rewritten and deconstructed in the groups before being distributed
to the whole group via e-mail. Students also used the stories as data when theoretically
analysing their process-writings throughout the course with the aim of understanding
their stories from different theoretical perspectives and discourses. All in all, I have
analysed about 150 stories during the years 2005–7. Examples from the data are
included in this paper.

Deconstruction as an analysis strategy for both the students and myself

as researcher
Deconstruction has been used as an analysis strategy in both the collaborative work
with the students and in my own research of the stories and process-writings (the
 Gender and Education 395

hybrid writing reports) collected. Deconstruction is neither a tool nor a method, but is
more like strategy, or another way of thinking, that invites the researcher to see new
meanings in the texts (McQuillan 2000, 6; Burman and MacLure 2004). Patti Lather
(2007) writes that a Derridean deconstructive play with both the stable and the perma-
nent can break up binary oppositions and help us move away from the predictable and
assumed. In both my study and my teaching I use deconstructive strategies to make
possible a wider understanding of mathematics and the constitution and reconstitution
of mathematical subjectivities.
The strategy involves putting the concept of mathematics ‘under erasure’, as Derrida
formulates it (1976, 3). The striking through of a word, for example mathematics, signi-
fies a questioning or cross-examination that does not completely obliterate or erase the
original term. Rather, the effect of ‘striking’ or ‘putting under erasure’ is to radicalise
the term in question (Elam 1994, 11). The dominant perspectives of mathematics can
be understood as pure, materialised and reinforced. In order to talk and think about
mathematics in new ways we need to deconstruct the meaning of it. How should we
think about mathematics if we do not think of it in the most general, universal and domi-
nant way? Such a reversal makes other understandings visible, even though the old ones
are still visible beneath the striking through of the word.
In the following section I illustrate my analysis by using examples taken from the
course to illustrate how these writing practices changed the students’ attitudes to
mathematics.

Readings from the data – troubling attitudes and subjectivities

Working with students’ stories about mathematical memories
In this section the aim is to show how the students’ writings and discussions about
mathematical memories and their deconstructive work led to changes in their atti-
tudes. Here I present examples from the data material – some of the collected words
and examples of collective biographies – in order to illustrate how the students
slowly began to understand their attitudes and notions as unstable, changeable and
performative.
When the students were asked to write the first 10 words that came to mind on
hearing the word ‘mathematics’ they all (75 students) included words that can be
understood as negative and even traumatic. For example, they used words like ‘stom-
ach trouble’, ‘tests’, ‘problems’, ‘worried’, ‘difficult’, ‘complicated’, ‘headache’,
‘problematical’, ‘anxiety’, ‘fearful’, ‘cold sweat’, ‘shakiness’, ‘uninteresting’ and
‘boring’.4 Anxiety is a dominant feeling here, as is a strong resistance to the subject
of mathematics. It is easy to understand that many of these students did not experience
pleasure when thinking about studying mathematics in teacher education. However,
what really surprised me when reading the students’ childhood memory stories was
that even though the students’ attitudes to and notions about the subject of mathemat-
ics were negative and traumatic, their childhood memory stories included passion,
longing and a desire for mathematics as well as specific and positive memories of
learning situations connected to mathematics.
Many students wrote stories about how as young children they identified them-
selves as competitive in relation to doing mathematics, and how they sometimes
enjoyed the repetitive and instrumental components of a maths class. Paradoxically,
in conjunction with experiences of severe stomach aches, anguish and hate, they also
wrote about how they appreciated and felt pleasure in working with the maths book
396 A. Palmer

and with the competitive activities organised by the teachers in their childhood class-
rooms. This paradoxical relationship in subjectivity-constituting processes has also
been discussed by other researchers (Butler 1999; Walkerdine 1998; de Freitas 2008).
Butler (1997) theoretically describes the process of subjectification as a simultaneous
process of being subjected to discursive practices while taking up one’s discursive
agency through that very same process. This explains the possibility of simultaneously
loving and hating mathematical learning practices, as shown in my data (about 30%
of the stories can be defined as ‘love–hate stories’). The biography example below
encompasses these paradoxical feelings:
She is working as fast as she can. Only two more pages left in the exercise book; the ‘sun
book’. She looks at her watch and thinks that she can make it. The teacher has promised
that the first children that finished the ‘sun book’ today can sit in the small group-room
for the rest of the semester. Only the smartest kids in the class sit in the group-room:
Liza, Mike, Andy and Gus. She and Kenny are both at the end of the ‘sun-book’ and it
feels amazing that she has a chance to sit in the group-room for the rest of the semester,
even if there’s only three weeks left until the summer holidays. Her heart is beating with
excitement and she is counting fast and looks in the key after every sum. Now she is done
and she sees that Kenny is almost done too. Actually she would like to check the key
again but she also would like to come to the teacher’s desk first with her ‘sun-book’.
Now, now, now … she is getting up and slides on her socks on the floor. When the
teacher has corrected the book she says: ‘Now you can go to the group-room’. The
teacher gives her the ‘Pear-book’ which is shiny and shimmering. She takes the book to
her nose and smells it; it smells like candy. With lots of self confidence she swaggers by
Kenny and sees how he is struggling with the last sums in the ‘sun-book’. She opens the
door to the group-room where the sun is flooding in from the window. The bell rings and
it is time for a break. (Report No. 12, 2006)
In this memory story, like several of the other stories in this study, the girl seems to
be working in a disciplined, quick and purposeful way. I have identified two powerful
discourses that appear to dominate this narrative classroom: a competition discourse
and an instrumental discourse. Both these discourses can be understood as dominating
what can be said and done in this classroom and as producers of mathematical subjec-
tivity. Discourses of competition and instrumental learning are present in many of the
stories collected as data, and about half the stories involve one of these two discourses.
The girl in this story gives the impression that she is mastering them both. As Butler
writes: ‘The more we master the dominant ideologies or discourses, their rules and laws,
the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simulta-
neously, and this paradoxical simultaneity constitutes the ambivalence of subjection’
(Butler 1997, 116).
For the girl in the story the situation in the classroom appears to be both amazing
and nerve-wracking. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously and the girl’s
subjectivity as a ‘good schoolgirl’ can be understood as constituted in an embodied
and paradoxical way (Davies et al. 2001). When constructing binaries from the story,
the hidden discourse of maths-anxiety is made visible.

‘working as fast as she can’/working slowly

‘looks at her watch’/has time to think
‘the smartest kids’/the stupidest kids
‘feels amazing’/feels terrible
‘a chance to sit in the group-room’/no chance of sitting in the group room
‘would like to check the key again’/doesn’t want to check the key
‘corrects the book’/leaves the book as it is
‘self-confidence’/lack of self-confidence
 Gender and Education 397

The words on the left-hand side can be understood as creating a discourse of pleasure
and brightness; a discourse filled with self-confidence, carefulness, speediness and
adjustability. This discourse is desirable for the girl in the story and also, from my
point of view, is one that many maths teachers in Swedish schools would like their
pupils to make use of. Nevertheless, the anxiety discourse in the story (Walkerdine
1998), however hidden, is just as strong.
Talking about and writing memory stories changed the students’ notions about and
attitudes to mathematics. The students’ process-writings include examples of how the
students started to think differently about mathematics. The following extract exem-
plifies this:

For the very first time in my life I am fascinated by maths. I have always seen this subject
as something very dry and statistical. But now I realise that mathematics is a social
construction and that there still are ‘truths’ that we don’t know about. If someone like
me is to become interested in mathematics I think it is necessary to give the subject
depth. I wonder whether anybody thinks like that in school. (Report No. 21, 2006)

Having got this far in the course, the students thought that mathematics did not feel as
difficult and repulsive as it had done before the course began. At the same time, the
students started to understand the complexity and ambivalence of this work, and that
attitudes and notions were unstable, contextual and could be understood as performa-
tive. We then moved on to aesthetic readings of the memory stories to deepen our
understanding of mathematical subjectivities.

An aesthetic turn in teaching mathematics changed students’

mathematical subjectivities
Looking again at the above list of binaries, none of the words or phrases relate to an
aesthetic discourse. In other words, there’s no connection to undertaking more
creative, elaborative or aesthetic work with mathematics in the classroom. When
reading the students’ stories, however, I was repeatedly confronted with the fact that
no-one included aesthetic discourses or co-operative work when describing their
mathematical childhood memories. I wondered what would happen if I specifically
looked for what could be understood as aesthetic in the stories, instead of just paying
attention to the words that seemed to be part of the dominant discourses already famil-
iar to me? I therefore decided to read the memories again with this in mind.
There are several words, signs and sentences in the story of the girl and her longing
to sit in the group-room that connect to what can be understood as an aesthetic
discourse. For example, the ‘Pear-book’ is described as ‘shiny and shimmering’ and
smells ‘like candy’, which connects to sensuous discourses that interact with the girl.
The material, the thing/ book can be seen as a dynamic and active part of the girl’s
constitution of mathematical subjectivity (Barad 2008). The story also involves poetry
and beauty connected to things and feelings. Altogether, this reading drew my atten-
tion to the bodily, material and aesthetic signs that were already in the text but that I
did not see, simply because I was not looking for them.
I suggested that the students look for aesthetic signs in their stories. Interestingly,
they were just as astonished as I had been on finding them and confessed that they had
not thought about aesthetics when writing the stories. In deconstructive thinking
aesthetic discourses are already present in the text, and a new reading simply ‘opens
398 A. Palmer

up’ the text and shows how ‘aesthetic signs’ link to new discourses and uncover new
meanings in the texts (McQuillan 2000, 27).
When the students started to read their stories and look for aesthetic discourses,
they were inspired to write new memory stories where these discourses were more
strongly present and visible. One student wrote about when she went figure-skating as
a child and how the lines on the ice could be understood as geometrical shapes. She
remembered what gliding quickly and confidently on the ice felt like and the crunch-
ing sound of the sharp blade as it cut through the ice. Another student wrote about
memories of her beautiful collection of glass-marbles and how she placed them into
groups of 10 and worked out how multiplication tables were constructed. A third
student remembered riding her horse as a child and how she used the mathematical
concepts of ‘diagonal’ and ‘circumference’ when riding in the enclosed pasture.
Deconstructive work with the stories helped the students to come to new under-
Figure 3.

standings of what teaching mathematics with aesthetic learning processes might entail
and new ways of understanding subjectivity. This work illustrated mathematical
subjectivity as something multiple, contradictory, discursive and changeable. It also
helped the students to notice how the material, or things, in the stories worked as
active agents. Karen Barad (2008, 146) writes that things are not just passive or dead
objects but can be understood as performative agents, filled with material agency that
‘do’ something to our subjectivity. In this sense one could say that discursively
inscribed material things/artefacts that are part of daily life, such as the Pear-book or
the glass marbles, can be understood as agentic in subjectivity-constituting processes.
Even numbers, formulas, words, signs, symbols and equations written on paper or the
white board can, according to Barad, be understood as performative agents that affect
the articulation of mathematical subjectivity.

Changing attitudes and your mathematical subjectivity – a discussion

The main question in this paper is how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influ-
ence and affect ECE students’ attitudes towards maths and their understanding of their
own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10-week alternative maths
course. In this concluding part of the paper I first of all discuss how this course changed
the students’ attitudes to and notions about the subject of mathematics, then I go on to
discuss the students’ subjectivity constitution and reconstitution processes during the
course. In the final section I discuss new ways of understanding mathematics as a
subject.

How has this course changed the students’ attitudes and notions towards the subject
of mathematics?
As mentioned earlier, the students gradually came to understand attitudes to and
notions about mathematics as something unstable, contextual and performative. The
practice of writing and telling childhood maths stories showed how attitudes and
notions can be understood as being produced by discourse and discursive practices.
That is, through our use of language, talking and acting we become more or less math-
ematical in different situations and in collaboration with powerful discourses (Butler
1999).
Most of the students, more than 90% to be exact, expressed in their reports that
they were more positive to the subject of mathematics after the maths course than they
 Gender and Education 399

had been prior to it, and that the course had changed the way they thought about their
future work with maths and young children. One student wrote that: ‘This course has
given me a wider, deeper and more nuanced picture of mathematics’ (Report No. 7,
2005). However, even if the majority of students wrote that they felt more positive to
mathematics after the course, almost 50% of the students described it in terms of a
love–hate relationship and that this new deconstructive way of thinking about maths
was complex, ambivalent and difficult to carry out in practice. They were not at all
sure how or whether they would be able to maintain their positive attitudes on comple-
tion of the course. They feared being drawn into more traditional mathematical
discourses on leaving the company of this particular group and the common experi-
ence of something quite different. Several students wrote about the importance of
finding a good workplace in the future, where teachers worked in similar ways as on
the course.
As I hope I have illustrated thus far, attitudes to and notions about mathematics can
be understood as contextual. The fact that they change means that you can reconstitute
attitudes and subjectivity differently in different discursive environments. I would like
to think that the students learned this during this course. Attitudes can thus be under-
stood as aspects of the discursive production of subjectivity that are neither stable nor
neutral (Butler 1999).

The students’ constitution and reconstitution of subjectivities

Butler’s (1999) notion that subjectivities are constituted through discourses displaces
the idea of whether one is essentially mathematical or not and instead suggests the
possibility of becoming mathematical in multiple ways in specific and local discursive
practices. Through their writings and performances the students showed that it is
possible to reconstitute mathematical subjectivities. All the 75 students in the study
agreed that this course as a whole, and the aesthetic workshops in particular, had
changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different
and shifting ways.
After finishing the course about 50% of the students wrote that they felt more
confident and happy when thinking about teaching maths. They also wrote that they
thought about the term ‘maths-person’ in a completely different way after the course.
Through the deconstructive and co-operative work undertaken, the meaning of ‘being
a maths-person’ had changed into something multiple and contextual. As one student
wrote: ‘the course has “opened up doors” to new ways of understanding myself in
relation to mathematics’ (Report No. 22, 2007). Here subjectivity can be understood
as construed in an ambivalent relationship among gendered and powerful discourses,
dependent on how the subject is ‘materialised’ through language, culture and mathe-
matical and gendered discourses (Butler 1999, 24).
Nearly 20% of the course members wrote that although their understanding of their
own subjectivity had changed, they still understood themselves as ‘non-maths-people’.
As the analysis shows, changing discursive patterns, moving, acting and talking,
performative, in new ways in relation to mathematics is very hard work. Materialising
other ways of understanding and performing new ways of talking and thinking about
mathematics, as well as changing bodily gestures and motions used in the classroom,
is difficult. The following extract from a student’s report illustrates the ambivalence
that many of the students felt in relation to future pedagogical work after completing
the 10-week alternative maths course:
400 A. Palmer

I realise that I struggle with a scepticism; is making dance choreography really mathe-
matics? I feel that I am in doubt and that the word ‘contradiction’ is my most intimate
companion right now. Is this how it feels when you are in between different discourses?
(Report No. 19, 2005)

This student is making a separation between dance choreography, which can be

understood as a more aesthetic and alternative mathematical practice, and mathe-
matics as a more rational and conventional kind of mathematics. She writes that she
is positioned ‘in between’ different discourses. This can, however, also be under-
stood as trying to transgress the binaries of logical thinking/imaginary thinking and
embrace both sides at the same time. Trying to make use of both sides of the
dichotomies simultaneously, or going beyond, is also about repeatedly rearticulating
mathematical subjectivities. Corresponding with Butler, a reconstitution of subjec-
tivity takes time and has to be repeatedly practised in order to become materialised,
intelligible and embodied (1999, 41).

How did the students understand the investigative, aesthetic and interdisciplinary
music/maths workshop?
Almost all the students (95%) understood the aesthetic interdisciplinary learning
processes in the music/maths workshops as something that led to them changing the
way they understood their mathematical subjectivities. All the students were not so
enthusiastic and excited after this event, however. Some students, mainly those who
actually liked mathematics and understood themselves as ‘maths-people’ before the
course started (about 5%), wrote about how confusing this event appeared to them
and how terrified they felt when they understood that they were not going to be
doing ‘usual’ maths in this workshop. One student wrote about how the aesthetic
discourse with music, co-operation and creativity ‘threatened her already established
subjectivity as a “maths-person”’ (Report No. 26, 2007).
This quote can be read from a gendered point of view. As several studies show, it
is more socially acceptable for women to express negative attitudes towards mathe-
matics in public than men, at least in the Western world (Aronson et al. 1999;
Gallagher and Kaufman 2006). The majority of the students taking the alternative
maths courses adopted ‘not good at maths’ positions at the beginning of the course.
The handful of women with an already established positive mathematical subjectivity
can be understood as feeling comfortable doing maths within a traditional and rational
maths discourse (cf. de Freitas 2008). In this specific course, though, they could be
understood as both marginalised and rejecting alternative, aesthetic and creative
discourses (cf. Lenz Taguchi 2005, 11).
So, the complex constitution and reconstitution of subjectivities in this maths
course did not only involve negotiation about mathematics and mathematical subjec-
tivity, but also consideration as to how aesthetic and powerful gendered discourses
intervene in the processes.

New ways of understanding mathematics as a subject

Stepping beyond the borders of the disciplinary structure of mathematics is important
when working with the reconstitution of students’ gendered subjectivities and atti-
tudes in EC teacher education. In my work with the ECE students taking this course,
 Gender and Education 401

I can see that taking part in this kind of deconstructive ‘both-and’ practices challenges
the student’s understandings about what mathematics is; both in their own learning
and when it comes to teaching young children. In addition to learning mathematical
rules and strategies, the students taking this course learn how to think deconstructively
and gender-consciously and how to analyse their mathematical teaching practices in
multiple ways. However, as the above extract shows, the students are troubled by the
fact that that they cannot define what maths ‘really’ is.
During the duration of this study I met a number of students (as well as curious
outsiders from different disciplines) who questioned whether what we do in this
course really is mathematics. It would appear that maths is a subject that has been
materialised, over time, as a firmly established, solid and pure discipline that seem
easy to classify and delimit. Crossing this strong, dominant regulation and reconstitut-
ing its limits has sometimes felt rather dangerous. In the workshops we have not
worked with maths on one particular day and aesthetics on another, but in an all at
once and simultaneous fashion, which inevitably makes the definition of the work
seem blurred and indistinct when viewed from a traditional maths perspective. In
effect, a new subject has been created in this course that does not really fit into the
disciplines of the academic world (cf. Elam 1994). However, much more research
needs to be done to establish the long-term consequences of this way of working on
teachers’ and children’ subjectivity, gendered attitudes and notions, and the renegoti-
ation of the limits of the subject of mathematics.

Concluding discussion
This study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined
to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had
changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different
and varying ways. This kind of alternative maths education provides opportunities to
constitute subjectivity as a ‘maths-person’, and, most importantly, to deconstruct the
meaning of being a ‘maths-person’. I would like to think that teachers who are aware of
their own complex processes of mathematical subjectivity are also capable of identifying
the mathematical subjectivities that develop in children during the pre-school years.
Besides showing the difficulties involved in reconstituting mathematical subjectiv-
ity and changing attitudes and notions in EC teacher education, this study has also
highlighted the possibilities in terms of working with collective memory writing,
deconstructive thinking and feminist post-structural theory, aesthetic workshops, peda-
gogical documentation, process-writings and going beyond binary thinking in teaching
and learning processes. Gendered notions and attitudes that affect work with mathe-
matics in pedagogical practices are made visible and challenge the students to under-
stand how dominant discourses affect maths education. Some of the discourses are
more embodied than others, and will constantly try to dominate, particularly if parents,
teachers and children take them for granted, whereas new and different discourses
might feel as awkward and ill-fitting as a pair of new shoes. However, as this study
shows, even though ‘new shoes’ sometimes pinch at the first wearing, they can even-
tually pace the way to new adventures.

Notes
1. Ninety-seven per cent of the students taking the Early Childhood Education course at
Stockholm University are women.
402 A. Palmer

2. All the students taking part in this one-year course between 2004 and 2007 (120 students)
were invited to participate in an ongoing research project on learning processes during the
course of a year. The students who agreed signed a written document, which also allowed
for the possibility of withdrawal during the year and up to one year after the conclusion of
the course (98% of the students agreed to take part in the project). They agreed that the
project could use all their written material and documentation produced during this year.
They were also guaranteed full anonymity and the opportunity to read the research analysis
before publication. The project has also featured in several reports (Lenz Taguchi 2005,
2006, 2007, forthcoming; Lind 2004; Palmer 2007, 2008). The data for the study described
in this paper (carried out 2005–7) consists of 75 of the 120 students’ written material and
documentation collected from the 10-week maths course from three different cohorts.
3. Every maths course of 10 weeks involves five workshops involving maths/music, maths/
dance, maths/visual arts, etc. These events have been documented by the students and
teachers alike and theorised in report writings.
4. Other categories of words in the data material (a total of about 750 words) were: (1) words
connected to a school discourse such as ‘black board’, ‘pencils’, ‘maths books’, ‘ruler’, etc.
(I theorise around the school discourse in Palmer 2008); (2) words connected to everyday
life such as ‘shopping’, ‘cooking’, ‘dieting’, ‘money’, etc.; (3) words connected to play and
games such as ‘crosswords’, ‘hide and seek’, ‘suduko’; and (4) words connected with joy
(only 5%) such as ‘fun’, ‘happiness’ and ‘amusing’. More can be read about this in Palmer
(2007).

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