Analysing the data and organising the data

4.5.1 Critical discourse analysis in a Foucauldian tradition

Tamboukou (2008) uses Foucault to reveal how practice is negotiated and/or defined as ‘legitimate’ through the subjectivities produced within discourse. This enables an interrogation of the particular ways in which voice is authorised, contested and/or silenced. This is an approach that challenges assumptions about agentic choice, and interrogates the diminishing spaces of ways to know, which for this thesis involves questioning what it means to the individual to be judge (and to be judged) as (non)mathematical. Mendick (2005) and Mendick et al. (2008, 2009) reveal how discourses provide the range of positions from within which, individuals can then mark themselves as being (un)able to ‘do’ mathematics or ‘be’ a mathematician.

By starting with a critical discourse analysis, I was enabled to identify the ways in which discourses produce particular ways of thinking, by paying attention to aspects of written texts (curriculum, teacher training frameworks, policy etc.). In Chapters six through nine, I then draw upon discourse analysis of research data to seek new

understandings of the ways in which the actors perpetuate the conventional myths of ‘normal’. In adding to Foucault’s discourse analysis, I then apply a Lacanian reading of the ‘big Other’ to conceptualise certain practices as ‘real’, to reveal what the learning of mathematics feels and looks like to the participants in this research. This will enable me to come to a new understanding of how norms come to be so

entrenched that it makes particular forms of practice possible/impossible, often in distressing ways (Walshaw, 2007). However, before offering an analysis of the stories of ‘taming’ mathematics, I first want to provide a structured account to maintain a sense of the ‘people’ behind these complicated and paradoxical narratives of (not) ‘taming’ mathematics.

83 4.5.2 Storying the participant

In starting the analysis of the storied empirical data through Bourdieu’s tools of habitus, field and capitals, the intention is to establish a sense of the human that lies behind the identity work. I deconstruct and theorise the historical conditions that have created the possibilities of truths, as they have come to be understood by the

individuals. Having reached an understanding of the structural account, I then move towards a Foucauldian tradition of psychoanalysis, to deconstruct why ambiguity and uncertainty is resisted in the mathematical classroom and why seemingly 'successful' encounters of mathematics can be met with resistance, dissatisfaction and challenge.

Lawler (2008) suggests that the ‘truths’ people produce through stories are not ‘truths’ as conventionally understood in positivist social science. In the post-structuralist condition, stories are always contested, and where reality is constituted it is viewed with caution and is, at best, an unstable approximation of the dominant discourses, or what Foucault (1972) coined as “truth games”. In broadly adapting a case study approach for Chapter six, the analytical task is not to replicate the ‘truths’ about these participants, nor to determine aspects of their ‘core’ learning selves. By opening up and ‘storying’ the individuals, I establish new connections between theory and practice. I draw attention to the particular ways in which this sample of learners has structured stories of their mathematical selves; as subjects of the academic discipline of mathematics, of numeracy, and of being judged against discourses of the

enterprising and responsible citizen. I make use of the ‘truth effect' (Walkerdine, 1984), but in doing so I am also in conversation with the emotional content of the stories. As Brown (2011: 97) posits:

The personalities that we are seeking to learn about can only be read against certain backdrops where we as researchers and they themselves seek to understand how personalities and research perspectives and backdrops and discourses and external demands and aspirations, and more come out in the wash. Brown et al. (2006), working within a context of teacher training, also turn to the stories of the individual to demonstrate how language alone fails to reveal the complicities of making sense of lived experiences. Through mobilising a Lacanian framework, they problematise the assumed cohesiveness of the hermeneutic process and tease out the ways in which discussions are productive of the symbolisations of

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what is judged as best practitioner. They demonstrate how, by idealising discourses of standards, fantasies and fears of (not) being judged to deliver ‘best’ practice structure practice.

Although this discourse contains much that can be valued … as a series of conceptualisations of teaching it lies some distance from and tends to obscure a more fundamental series of psychic and social processes …a series of conscious actions, unconscious processes, interactions, and conversations, impulses and responses, planned activities, disruptions (Brown et al., 2006: 62).

Walls (2009), working within a primary school context of learning mathematics, also draws on Lacan through a Foucauldian tradition, to interrogate how stories include fantasies and fears, which feed into practices that construct individual and collective actions within the classroom. Walls (2010) works through how, when a person hears, does, sees, and/or speaks of mathematics, they become entangled in mathematical constructions of the self. She interrogates how, when an individual asks for help with calculating a cost, or on encountering a (non)mathematical character on television, discusses an encounter of mathematics, they do so both as a human with fantasies and fears, and as a mathematical subject. In ‘storying’ the participant, my intention is to establish a sense of the “history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Rabinow, 2002: 326) in relation to discourses of numeracy, employment, and of the numerate citizen.

Walls (2009, 2010) is not the only author working within a post-structuralist tradition, to ‘story’ the individual. Black et al. (2009) also put the thoughts of Walkerdine (1998) to work, to investigate the complexities of the connections “rather than the separations into discrete persons acting on and as subjects” (Black et al., 2009: 73). They illuminate how material structures create a sense of the mathematical, and interrogate the spaces within the discourses that the ‘storied’ individuals occupy:

… we do not ask ‘is x true?’, but rather ‘what makes x possible?’ And ‘what are its effects?’ … This is a switch of focus which foregrounds not the individual and their choices and abilities, but the ways that people are assembled.

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