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This study is focused on a period that poses several challenges for the development of mathematics teachers' professional identities and agency: their first year of teaching in schools. During this period, beginning mathematics teachers confront tensions and contradictions among the principles, ideals, and experiences encountered during pre-service education and the demands, and restrictions of their teaching practice in schools. This article approaches this topic by developing an interpretative case study centered on one novice mathematics teacher, Sol. The aim is to describe and understand the development of Sol's professional identity and agency during her first teaching year. Considering identity development as a diachronic phenomenon, we carry out a narrative analysis of the research data. The findings show that Sol developed her professional identity and agency through a process that gathered together the teaching practices possible inside her school, the positions she could negotiate as a newcomer inside the institution, and the cultural practices and discourses embodied during pre-service education. The results bring to the forefront the profound and tense interactions between the intimate and personal terrain of mathematics teachers and the social and cultural world of the schools where they work. Sol's case also contributes to understanding the role that a robust pre-service education can play in the development of beginning teachers' professional identities and in the possibility they could become agents of transformation in their schools.

Several studies that reviewed the national and international literature on the identity of students and teachers have been conducted over the last five years to analyze how researchers in the field of mathematics education have used such a concept. This article has made a systematic meta-synthesis review of the five most relevant literature reviews on this topic published in the last two decades inside and outside Brazil. Its objective is to understand and discuss multiple perspectives and conceptualizations of teachers' professional identity, along with its implications for research in this area of investigation. The reviewing process of systematic reviews occurred by recording and interpreting each study to eventually discuss and elaborate an integrative synthesis of the final interpretative syntheses. The results reveal that identity conceptualizations have developed in a pendulum movement that oscillates between the dimensions of the subject and its social context, moving towards an interrelation. Research on the area identified theoretical-methodological problems, which still represent a challenge to formulate more operational conceptualizations. Furthermore, in terms of assumed perspectives and the methodologies of developing analysis, defining the concept of identity consistently and operationally is a path under construction and a challenge to be faced by the professional identity field of study. The study of multiple ways of conceptualizing and investigating identity, besides problematizing an important epistemological issue, provides relevant theoretical lenses or tools to analyze and understand the complexity of who and how teachers that work at schools are, particularly in the field of mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]