In this paper, I highlight the inadequacies of contemporary theoretical and philosophical orthodoxies to fully address pedagogic change. The required change is in mathematics education, and it has to do with enabling preservice teachers, upon graduation, to rework extant power relations in implementing new interactional patterns that centre the mathematics and the learner in dynamic, productive interaction. I interpret data from published research and my own teaching using psychological, overlaid with poststructuralist, constructs of the relationship between knowledge and action. In data interpretation I read "through" the words for a psychological interpretation (meaning), and I look at the words for poststructuralist indications of subjectification and identity formation (related to how well students recognise themselves as full participants in the combined discourses of mathematics and education). I have my cake and eat it; contradictory notions of the learner and learning to teach in innovative ways are held together to demonstrate (a) how it can happen that a teacher educator's aspirations can be held ransom to constituted assumptions that inconveniently work against change, and (b) how the recognition that humanist assumptions, mathematical proficiency and agency are discursively constituted (Davies, "1990") can suggest avenues for change in teacher education.