This is an ethnographic study from within mathematics teacher education in Sweden. A methodological insider approach enabled to view teacher education from the students’ perspectives, by focusing how discursive power-relations affected what becoming mathematics teachers brought forward as concerning during two years of education. I took a socio-political theoretical perspective and understood discourse, power and positioning as dynamically interrelated concepts, which allowed the analysis to foreground several aspects simultaneously and to illustrate elusive phenomena as they occurred and disappeared.

The results show that the mathematics education and mathematics discourses are open and multifaceted and reveal empowered positionings, whereas the language/culture and institutional discourses both are narrower and more constraining. These constraints, in turn, affect students’ possibilities to enact empowered positionings within the more open discourses. The core of education, that is mathematics and mathematics education, may therefore be obscured by discourses of “truths”.

The study shows a need for further research on how to strengthen students’ possibilities to influence their education, and to ask questions like why education is organised this way, and who benefits from that.