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International audience; The paper reports from analyses of one Norwegian secondary school mathematics teacher (Isaac) in his transition from university teacher education to employment in secondary school. The process of becoming a mathematics teacher is studied in terms of identity, based on the teacher’s participation within and at the boundaries of communities of practice at university and school. Adopting a longitudinal case-study design and methods from narrative analysis, the case of Isaac displays tensions between desires for own mathematics teaching and experiences of possibilities in practice. The case illustrates how the concept of identity is helpful for gaining insight into mathematics teachers’ ability and legitimacy to contribute to, and take responsibility for, the meanings that matter regarding mathematics, its teaching and learning, in their professional debut.

Based on a commognitive framework, we analyse the reasoning-and-proving processes of two teachers, and we identify the actions and routines that are visible when working on a given task. The data consist of video recordings of the teachers’ attempts to validate a stated hypothesis involving multiplicative reasoning. Six categories of what characterises the teachers’ initiation into a reasoning-and-proving discourse are identified. The findings reveal that some actions related to substantiation routines seem to be applicable for novice teachers. Examples of this include questioning validity and the use of words related to deductive reasoning. However, the teachers’ participation in the discourse is characterised by ritualised actions, as in their use of visual mediators. Furthermore, the analysis discloses the teachers’ tendency to use construction-related actions in what was designed to be a validating activity. Published by European Society for Research in Mathematics Education. Copyright the authors 2019.