What My Body Knows: An Account of Embodied Knowledge for Mathematics Teacher Education

Mathematics teacher educators make countless instructional decisions in our teaching, often without time to ponder the pros and cons of alternative actions. In this chapter, I seek to understand one such instructional decision using methods from autoethnography to unpack the bodily sensations that informed it. This analysis is situated within the scholarly literature on identity. The sensations that arose in my body while I was teaching are rooted in my prior experiences in and out of mathematics education, including my experiences as a mathematics learner in my childhood and my experience as an adopted person. I explicate some of these experiences and how they inform my ethics and ways of knowing for mathematics teacher education. I posit that the bodily sensations I experience during teaching keep me attuned to the ways learning poses a risk to the mathematics identities of my students and myself and inform my instructional decision-making. The findings suggest a closer look into embodied knowledge for mathematics teacher educators.