2013 Conference Proceedings - University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Sherman, 1977; Oakes, 1985; Oakes, Ormseth, Bell, & Camp, 1990; Sells, 1976; Walkerdine,1997).Epistemological empowerment concerns both one’s confidence in the use of mathematicsand a “personal sense of power over the creation and validation of knowledge” (Ernest, 2002, p.8). It is in this category that the professional empowerment (or pedagogical empowerment) of themathematics teacher falls. For many teachers and students, past experiences supports andsustains their belief that knowledge is created, legitimized, and exists outside of themselves. It iswith this conception of empowering the learner that teacher mathematical empowerment can beseen as equally vital.Pedagogical EmpowermentPedagogical empowerment (or professional empowerment) refers to teachers developinginto autonomous and reflective participants in education. Empowered teachers contain theconfidence to critically assess and construct mathematics teaching and learning experiences withand for their students (Ernest, 2002). Szydlik, Szydlik, and Benson (2003) found that the cultureand socio-mathematical norms of the classroom affected a change in pre-service teachers’mathematical beliefs as well as served to further their autonomy. Socio-mathematical normsestablished in the classroom are distinct from social norms in that they are unique to mathematicsclassrooms (Yackel & Cobb, 1996). For example, adequate justification is a social norm in manysubject areas but what constitutes as relevant and elegant for proof of a claim remains exclusivefor mathematics. Additionally,what becomes mathematically normative in a classroom is constrained by the currentgoals, beliefs, suppositions, and assumptions of the classroom participants. At the sametime these goals and largely implicit understandings are themselves influenced by what islegitimized as acceptable mathematical activity. (Yackel & Cobb, 1996, p. 460)The socio-mathematical norms established in the classroom studied by Szydlik et al. (2003)were shown to affect their participants’ autonomy. These participants indicated that they were“now aware that mathematics is a human creation and they can be a part of making mathematicsthemselves” (p. 272) in a culture that views mathematics as making sense. Additionally,Anderson and Piazza (1996) found that a classroom practice that eliminated lecture as the mainform of instruction together with the use of physical models (manipulatives, pictures, diagrams)served to reduce students’ anxiety about learning and teaching mathematics and increaseProceedings of the 40 th Annual Meeting of the Research Council on Mathematics Learning 2013 61