The professional identities of prospective mathematics teachers who teach through programming

Abstract

As has been the case in many countries around the world, the new Norwegian curriculum from 2020 included programming as part of mathematics education. However, little is known about how prospective teachers perceive this addition in regard to their developing professional identities. When the results from an electronic survey of 394 prospective teachers showed unexpected findings, five of the subjects were asked to participate in a focus group interview in order to explore some of these results. The focus group interview was conducted to understand how prospective teachers considered the past, present and future aspects of their professional identities as teachers of mathematics through programming. The results reveal that, although the prospective teachers had little experience of programming, they were positive regarding its implementation in mathematics lessons because they identified themselves as digital natives; they therefore believed that learning to program would be easy. They aligned themselves with their students, as masters of technology, in contrast to their future colleagues, whom they implicitly described as digital immigrants. The findings of this study have implications for teacher education. Even if the prospective teachers have a positive attitude toward programming and consider themselves digitally competent, a limited understanding of how programming can be integrated into their mathematics teaching will affect the identities that they see for themselves as teachers who teach mathematics through programming.