In global as well as national educational policies and in the public media debate is mathematical competence often singled out as the specifically most important general competence for citizens in the twenty-first century (Adler, Ball, Krainer, Lin, & Novotna, 2005). This increasing demand for mathematics proficiency, combined with the Swedish schoolchildren have shown declining performance in recent years PISA measurements has the consequence that there has been a call for more teachers and better mathematics teaching. Obviously, quality teaching put teachers in focus and this in turn leads to questions about their preparation and professional development within teacher education. Research in mathematics for teaching, however, shows that the kind of knowledge needed for being able to teach mathematics is complex and that there is a need to better understand how mathematics and teaching is combined in teacher development and teachers’ identities (Adler, 2006; Adler et al., 2005). Our research has an interest in this area and is specifically focused on student teachers learning to become teachers of Mathematics.  

In previous research (Beach & Player-Koro, 2012; Eriksson, 2009; Eriksson & Player-Koro, 2014; Player-Koro, 2012) we have investigated how perfomative policy discourses impact on student mathematics teachers development of professional knowledge. These studies has shown how institutional arrangements of education, in where the policy demands has been recontextualised, has prevented student teachers from developing a deeper understanding of both the didactic mathematical knowledge (the professional knowledge about how to teach mathematics) as well as of their mathematical subject knowledge.

The aim with the study presented here is to explore how professional knowledge for teaching mathematics is produced by student teachers within educational arrangement were student teachers are requested to cooperate and learn from each other. This is done in two different forms of peer-education arrangements: In the first form the students are assigned to peer groups that has seminars where students pool their resources on a particular topic or task. The other form is a form of peer tutoring where some student teachers were selected to teach their peers in order to support and prepare them for the exam (Carmody & Wood, 2009). In both forms is the basic idea to encourage students to collaborate and learn from one another. The following questions will be given special attention: How will student teachers engaged in peer education discursively produce school mathematics and their professional knowledge needs for their future profession as mathematics teachers?

This research is grounded in a theoretical tradition that takes it´s point of departure in the examination of issues of power and how power relations between different agents shape what is counted as official knowledge that in turn through the educational practice constructs different pedagogic identities (Beach, 1997; Bernstein, 2000). The analysis is concerned with the understanding of different aspects of institutional educational arrangement, of situated events related to the on-going process of teacher education and from the perspective of student teachers. A concept that theorises the process where ‘official knowledge’ is produced and distributed in educational institutions is the concept of the pedagogic device (Bernstein, 2000). This device provides a language of description in relation to pedagogical communications for both the relay (specialised communication practices) and what is relayed (principles for selection). The pedagogic device thus describes the underlying principles for a process in which symbolic control is materialised through the internal communicative practices of educational institutions (Beach, 1997). The theoretical concepts inherent in the pedagogic device and their function can be used to describe how the regulation of consciousness through communication in educational arrangements is an extension of power relations that exist externally to the educational practice (Au, 2008; Bernstein, 2000; Singh, 1997).

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