ABSTRACT
The term 'teacher professionalism' is generally used in one of two ways in the literature. According to Goodson and Hargreaves, teacher professionalism should move beyond attempting to reduce educational knowledge to the level of scientific certainty, rise above 'the recent clamour for technical competency and subject knowledge' and deal with the morally-laden and politicized areas of the teacher's work. The central design feature of the new curriculum was its under-specification of disciplinary knowledge, deliberately providing a great deal of leeway for teachers and schools to develop curricula and teaching strategies suited to the specific context of their pupils. The chapter examines the issues from the vantage point of the professional knowledge base of mathematics teachers. Mathematics is transformed into a school curriculum through a process of recontextualization. A widespread agreement among South African teacher educators is that the subject knowledge of matriculants entering initial teacher education programmes is problematic.
