Chapter 5: Fortifying The Intrapersonal Through Attending To The Interpersonal: Motivating Mathematics Self-Concept Through Fruitful Student-Teacher Relationships

Much of the discourse surrounding mathematics achievement in the Unites States focuses on gaps in scores disaggregated by categories, such as race. Gutierrez (2008) describes this narrow preoccupation as “gap-gazing.” Giroux, Lankshear, McLaren, and Peters (Martin, 2007) attest that this kind of emphasis has been influential in establishing, maintaining, and disseminating a masternarrative used to position students of color, whom these data report as underperforming, as mathematically incompetent—or worse, incapable. Yet, the portrait communicated almost exclusively through a heightened attention to standardized test data is often incomplete. Raw achievement data may be a necessary component of the narrative—especially within the climate of No Child Left Behind—but they are not sufficient. Although these data are communicative, educators, researchers, and policymakers should be cautious in their interpretations and implications. Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989) suggests that assessing students’ beliefs about mathematics is an important component of the overall assessment of mathematical knowledge (Spangler, 1992). It recommends not only that educators are expected to be aware of students’ mathematical beliefs, but also that considerable importance can be attributed to students’ awareness of their own beliefs toward mathematics. These beliefs include the ways students conceive themselves in relation to and as doers of mathematics.