Abstract

AbstractThis thesis investigates how mathematics educators can reclaim pedagogical agency within an English education system dominated by performativity, compliance, and examination-driven accountability. Grounded in critical pedagogy and drawing on six decades of professional experience, it offers a practitioner-led, reflexive inquiry into how pedagogical beliefs, professional identity, and teacher agency are formed, constrained, and reconstituted over time within particular institutional and policy contexts.The study adopts narrative inquiry as its overarching methodology, operationalised through personal memory work, critical-incident reflection, and historical policy analysis. Professional experience is treated not as anecdote but as analytic data, interrogated through multiple reflexive lenses to reveal how systemic structures, cultural norms, and inherited pedagogical assumptions shape practice across a career. The research examines how international pedagogical models - particularly Japanese Lesson Study (JLS) and Teaching through Problem Solving (TtPS) - can inform collaborative, inquiry-led professional learning when critically adapted to the English context.The findings show that structural pressures - including Ofsted inspection, accountability metrics, and curriculum mandates - narrow pedagogical purpose and erode professional autonomy. However, the study demonstrates that agency is not an individual possession but a relational and ecological accomplishment, emerging most powerfully through collective inquiry, shared moral purpose, and sustained professional dialogue. Where such conditions are present, mathematics education can be re-imagined as dialogic, inquiry-led, and humanising.The thesis contributes to knowledge by offering a longitudinal, critically reflective account of how pedagogical beliefs and professional identities are reproduced or resisted over time, and by reframing teacher resistance as identity continuity rather than deficit. Methodologically, it demonstrates how reflexive practitioner inquiry, informed by critical pedagogy, can function as a rigorous and ethically grounded mode of educational research. In doing so, the study challenges narrow performance-based conceptions of educational success and advances a vision of mathematics education centred on dialogue, collaboration, and human flourishing - recognising teachers as intellectual and moral agents capable of shaping educational futures.

Awarding Institution(s)

University of Plymouth

Supervisor

Vicky Bamsey, Jon Merrison

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2026

Embargo Period

2026-07-29

Deposit Date

July 2026

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