Communitarian ethics and its coexistence with other ethics in an initial mathematics teacher education activity

Abstract

From the perspective of the theory of objectification, the ways in which students and teachers relate in the mathematics classroom reaffirm the ontological condition of their existence. When these relations express a strong commitment of individuals towards collective work to achieve learning, the activity shows features of a communitarian ethic in motion. However, this ethic seems to coexist dialectically with other ethics in the act of knowing. In this article, we attempt to answer the question: How do pre-service teachers and the teacher educator embody different ethics and deal with the coexistence of these ethics in an initial teacher education activity that seeks to promote a communitarian ethic? To this end, we analyze an episode that describes the forms of relating to others among four pre-service mathematics teachers and the teacher educator while they discuss a task centered on learning the equivalence and order of fractions. Through a dialectical-materialist analysis, we reveal some contradictory features of a relation of commitment to the activity that allowed us to identify features of the ethics of obedience, closed, and communitarian. In the activity, the communitarian ethic was embodied by the participants after dealing with other ethics that resisted it. We highlight, on the one hand, that the same student can embody different ethics in the same activity, depending on the relations they establish with others and, on the other hand, that the ethics embodied in the activity are strongly intertwined with the social, historical, and cultural contexts of the participants.