This project explores pre-service teacher's experiences with learning, teaching and the nature of mathematics during an elementary mathematics curriculum course. I focus on interpreting student participants' evolving images of mathematics/teaching, to make sense of my own evolving images of mathematics/teaching. This inquiry is framed by principles of complexity, which is a post-positivist and holistic framework for interpreting social phenomena. The methodology is oriented by narrative inquiry, which is a means to notice and interpret the co-constructed storied experiences of others and self. As a result of student participant data analysis processes, an interpretive lens emerged for understanding a student's evolving images of mathematics/teaching in terms of co-negotiating tensions, dissonances and contradictions among available narratives within a participant's apparent experiences. My interpretations of student stories are a means of understanding my own story as a negotiation of competing narratives. The processes and products of this inquiry may provide insight into the complex question of teachers changing and changing teachers.

Paul Betts is an Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg. His research interests usually concern the nature of mathematics or mathematics education. A current research agenda considers teacher education as it pertains to the personal and professional learning trajectories of novice and future teachers.