STUDENTS' MATHEMATICAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN THEIR TRANSITION TO SECONDARY SCHOOL

Research suggests that identity is a powerful way to consider individual experiences as fundamentally embedded in, and contributing to, broad social, cultural and political influences on learning mathematics. In this paper I propose a 'performance metaphor' (Butler, 1988) for learners' mathematical identity. I discuss how this definition of identity provides insights into the interconnectedness of the personal and the socio-political, using data from an ongoing longitudinal study of students' identity construction in their transition from primary to secondary school.