Self-Study in Mathematics Teacher Education

Over the lifetime of ICMI, belief has evolved as a powerful notion in mathematics teacher education. Social psychologists studied the nature of beliefs and their influences on people’s actions in the early 1900s. But it was the advent of cognitive science in the 1970s and the resulting shift in research on teaching to a focus on teacher thinking that influenced interest in the study of teachers’ beliefs. A review of research reports presented at PME in its first 30 years (Ponte & Chapman, 2006) show that while there was little attention on beliefs in the 1980s, there has been a significant increase in their use from the early 1990s. These studies reflect the cognitive science influence and focus on: teachers ’ beliefs of mathematics and its teaching and learning, the relationships between these beliefs and instructional practice, and changing beliefs. Self-study in mathematics teacher education emerged and evolved in relation to this evolution of research on beliefs. In this paper, I discuss the nature and role of self-study in mathematics teacher education. In particular, I consider the relationship between beliefs and self-study, role of reflection in self-study and instructional approaches used to facilitate self-study in preservice mathematics teacher education. In these contexts, beliefs are viewed as a form of knowledge influencing mathematics teaching practice and self-study as an opportunity for acquiring more powerful beliefs in relation to both content and pedagogical knowledge