This article draws on the notion of epistemic agency to illustrate how the enactment of shared epistemic agency is enabled or hindered in a mathematics classroom for student teachers. I used data from an ethnographic study that was conducted in a third-year class of mathematics for educators. Data was drawn from verbal interactions that took place between mathematics student teachers, and between student teachers and myself as their lecturer, as they worked on class tasks. A narrative mode of analysing data was employed to synthesise data from critical incidents, while excerpts of these incidents represented data. From this analysis, I argue that, with extended wait time by a facilitator, students’ disposition of epistemic virtues and vices may enable or hinder enactment to epistemic agency, respectively. In article, those vices presented themselves as epistemic stinginess, prejudices against answers by peers and epistemic disclaimer. The epistemic virtues were presented as impartiality and intellectual courage. I further suggest that the recommended wait time of 1–3 during classroom questioning and answering should be extended for classes where epistemic practices are encouraged.

This article uses parts of qualitative data from the first author’s study that focused on exploring Pirie and Kieren’s process of folding back, revisiting previously held understandings of a concept for its extended understanding in order to solve the problem of enhancing Grade 10 learners’ reasoning in geometry. In South Africa, secondary school leavers and pre-service teachers have difficulties in understanding geometric concepts and little is known about learners’ geometric reasoning. Using teaching experiment methodology, we particularly tracked Grade 10 learners’ geometric reasoning through folding back. We targeted two groups of learners from a class of 54 in which learners grouped themselves: the first group consisted of two members and the second group consisted of three members. The selection of learners was prompted by the manner in which the learners argued and questioned each other during four weeks of exploratory teaching. Data were collected through participant observations, where notes were taken and video recordings made in different sessions. We analysed the field notes and verbatim transcriptions of the video recordings using Polkinghorne’s narrative analysis and analysis of narratives. Both the teacher’s and the learners’ interventions prompted effective folding back resulting in critical sharing of ideas. We thus argue that learners’ effective folding back is a powerful tool to enhance their geometric reasoning.

In this paper, we argue that during collaborative classroom interactions, ‘the mangle’ is entangled in different forms of agency that (dis)enable mathematical agency. We first unpack student’s agency in the context of collaborative classroom interactions, and then use excerpts of interactions to illustrate how ‘the mangle’ is entangled in resistant agency and relational agency. The excerpts were sourced from a Grade 11 mathematics classroom, facilitated by the first author, as students worked through an activity on factorization of quadratic expressions. We organize our analysis of the critical incidents of only student-student interactions using Mueller et al.’s (2012) framework to re-story how ‘the mangle’ is entangled.

Epistemic agency is increasingly recognised as an important focus in teacher education, yet little is known about how it is enacted when pre-service teachers (PSTs) reflect on learner struggles in Physical Sciences. This qualitative case study investigated how Physical Sciences PSTs enacted epistemic agency through reflective engagement with learner struggles. Situated in a final-year Classroom Research in Physical Sciences module, the study involved 73 PSTs’ written reflections and follow-up semi-structured interviews with eight participants. Data were analysed thematically, guided by the lens of epistemic agency. Findings revealed enactments of critical noticing, representational critique, and responsible pedagogical reasoning, with teacher noticing as a cross-cutting mechanism. The study concludes that structured reflection fosters epistemic virtues and recommends explicit integration of learning struggles and noticing practices in teacher education.

With the increasing number of students enrolling in South African Higher Education institutions, it is essential to determine what level of mathematical knowledge gaps and understanding they bring from secondary school level. This was the context for a study of first year undergraduate mathematics education students at the University of Limpopo. In this paper, we present our autoethnographical experiences of lecturing calculus courses for a teacher preparation programme. The patterns that emerged from our interactions with students revealed that they experienced difficulties in understanding basic algebraic procedures and recognising structure to solve algebraic problems in the context of differentiation. This made us aware that we needed to configure effective strategies to make up for the identified elementary mathematics knowledge gaps, which we assumed students brought with from Grade 12. Our quest to make up for the algebraic knowledge gaps does not only serve the purpose of enabling our student teachers’ mathematical knowledge, but to ensure that they develop good knowledge base needed to teach the subject during their training as well as once they qualify as teachers.