My struggle with maths may not have been a lonely one: Bibliotherapy in a teacher education number theory unit

Bibliotherapy provides a new approach to eliciting and understanding the affective responses of pre-service primary teachers. This paper further explores bibliotherapy as a reflective tool in teacher education by analysing affective responses of pre-service primary teachers studying an elective number theory unit. Pre-service teachers voluntarily wrote responses to readings about school students’ learning, discussed their understanding of their own experiences in the light of the readings, and identified readings that impacted most on them. The paper describes the responses using the five stages of the bibliotherapy and identifies some factors which affect levels of engagement with the process.