Shifts of Caring and Mathematical Content in Contexts of Marginalization: Prospective Teachers’ Use of Photovoice in Connecting (and Disconnecting) Mathematics and Socio-Ecological Issues

This paper explores how aspects of care and mathematical content come into play when prospective teachers design and teach a task centered on socio-ecological issues relevant to their lives. A group of 23 teachers, including 15 from the Bedouin community in Israel, took part in a task photo-design-teach-reflect cycle, which includes: 1) taking a photograph of an issue from everyday life and discussing it in class; 2) making a collaborative decision with 3–4 peers on an issue around which they would like to work, designing a mathematical task relating to that issue, and having a peer-assessment of that task; 3) teaching the task they designed to a group of school students, and reflecting on their teaching and learning. From the whole dataset, we discern two main patterns – teachers who moved from a personal to “far-other” context through the design process, and teachers who maintained a focus on their community or “near-other”. We offer two examples, one for each of the prominent patterns we found, suggesting that photovoice was effective in allowing teachers to raise issues of personal and community concern in a teacher education context, even when such issues were typically not used in the classroom.