Inside teachers’ affect: teaching as an occasion for math-redemption

Mathematics education is strongly interested in defining “what is necessary for teaching mathematics effectively”. The main directions of research emphasize the cognitive side of the answer to this question, trying to describe what kind of knowledge is needed in order to teach mathematics effectively. Starting from the point that teachers’ affect plays a crucial role in determining the quality of teaching, we discuss this issue from a theoretical point of view, describing our perspective in detail and introducing the construct of “attitude towards mathematics teaching”. We discuss some of the results of a study we conducted in order to investigate the attitude towards mathematics and its teaching of 189 primary school pre-service teachers. In particular, we focus on the emotional component, describing what we call the “math-redemption” phenomenon.