“Think about your math teachers”: a narrative bridge between future primary teachers’ identity and their school experience

Pre-service teachers approach their professional learning in mathematics with a complex set of needs and wants. These needs and wants are strongly affected by the tension deriving from the realisation of the gap between what an individual wants to become as a mathematics teacher (his/her ideal of mathematics teacher) and what he/she believes to be at present. Professional identity as a mathematics teacher can be seen as a continuous development arising from this gap. For these reason, both as researchers and as teacher educators, it appears significant to study what ideals of positive and negative mathematics teachers the future teachers have.