Maintaining Tensions: Braiding as an Analogy for Mathematics Teacher Educators’ Political Work

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

An original contribution, with merits in both the development of the analogy and in the use of narrative inquiry. The clarity of the writing allows the reader to fully engage with complex new ideas, while the addition of the researcher statements add so much to the overall image of braiding. The paper does justice to the newness of the analogy while also clearly calling for its extended use in further contextualised research. A strong academic argument is made for the analogy and for greater consideration relating to how teacher candidates develop political knowledge. 

Author Response

Please see the attached table.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

No additional comments. This is a strong and solid piece of scholarship that will add value to the field. I am grateful for having read it and intend to follow up with some new references.

Author Response

Please see the attached table.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript Maintaining Tensions: Braiding as an Analogy for Mathematics Teacher Educators' Political Work. Its theoretical contribution (‘the compass’) is clearly timely, helping/compelling us, mathematics teacher educators, to move past good intentions of supporting prospective mathematics teachers ‘become aware’ of the political nature of mathematics teaching and learning. Drawing on authors’ own experiences as teacher educators as data is impactful, and I appreciated that it provided rich narratives as proof of concept for the compass, while acknowledging that using the tool is far from straight forward (lovely braiding metaphor). I only have two minor comments:

 

(1) I am not completely sure that the following claim will be supported by the time the Special Issue is completed:

“While these dilemmas are raised in the volume, and their associated microaggressions (for MTEs and TCs) are evident, the authors do not include overarching guiding questions, frameworks, or resources for MTEs in doing this work.” (line 45 – 48)

 

I assume by volume the authors mean this Special Issue (they also use ‘chapter’ for the article). The second part of the claim certainly sounds highly probable, I would be extremely surprised to see another article that provides such concrete support for MTEs. The editors would be able to conclude, since they know what contributions are expected.

 

(2) Since I work in a small European country, I have come to accept that I will always have to explain the educational systems from my context, and that I will have to familiarise myself with the US systems (assumed to be shared knowledge among scholars in mathematics education research). Still, I wonder if perhaps it might be possible to add a couple of sentences for the benefit of non-US readers, explaining for example the acronym ATME and the AMTE standards, or edTPA etc.

 

These two comments are minor and can simply be ignored.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attached table.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf