Helen M Oughton

Yasukawa, K., Rogers, A., Jackson, K. and Street, B. (Eds) (2018) Numeracy as Social Practice: Global and Local Perspectives, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-28445-6.
This edited collection of chapters, part of Routledge’s Rethinking Development series, examines the uses of numeracy in a wide variety of contexts in countries around the world, and the educational approaches which reflect – or in many cases, fail to reflect – those real-life numeracy activities. Educators and researchers with a commitment to social justice and global development will find this book a valuable resource for building a broader vision of what numeracy means.

The role of dominant discourse in constructing a deficit view of adult numeracy is examined, using reports from recent international surveys of adult skills as illustrative examples. Social practice theory is introduced as an alternative perspective for examining the ways adults actually use numeracy in their daily lives and work. This perspective suggests the test items used by large-scale surveys such as PIACC are only proxies for real-life numeracy skills, and that performance in such tests may misrepresent the numeracy skills of adults. Instead, social practice theory suggests that adults may have informal, situated numeracy practices that serve them adequately in their daily lives. However, it also draws attention to the difficulty of transferring mathematics from the classroom to everyday numeracy situations, while it recognizes that adult numeracy learners may be motivated by other goals than functional numeracy, such as personal fulfillment or a gateway qualification. Alternative approaches to classroom teaching for adult students are suggested which acknowledge and draw on adults’ rich and varied experiences; the challenges and tensions of such approaches are explored.

This study examines how adult numeracy students drew on their informal knowledge in their classrooms; using audio-recordings of naturally-occurring discussions as they worked together to solve mathematical problems. Analysis of the recordings not only reveals the knowledge which the participating students contributed to their discussions, but also illuminates how they responded to, and appeared to value, each other’s contributions. Although students were found frequently to share knowledge about curricular and examination requirements, they rarely shared knowledge about out-of-classroom numeracy practices, even when their learning activities gave them opportunities to do so. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field, it is suggested that students’ reluctance to draw on their out-of-classroom practices is due to the historically-constituted values which they themselves place on different types of knowledge. A typology of conformative and disruptive knowledge contributions is proposed, which attempts to reconcile transformative ideals with the constraints of the contemporary classroom.

The concept of ‘funds of knowledge’ is critically reviewed, tracing a history of the term’s changing use since its original conception by Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg in the late 1980s, and discussing its relevance in adult literacy and numeracy classrooms. An attempt is made to locate the concept within wider theoretical frameworks, and in particular to relate it to Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. The article concludes that while the concept of funds of knowledge is powerful in disrupting discourses of deficit, practitioners or researchers who are committed to this approach need to be critically reflexive to avoid imposing their own, however well-intentioned, cultural arbitraries on learners.

While a substantial body of research suggests that adult numeracy and literacy learners possess funds of knowledge and informal practices, it is not always clear to what extent these might be used in teaching and learning. In this study of linguistic interaction in adult numeracy classrooms, analysis of naturally-occurring student-student collaborative discourse is used to argue that mathematical word problems, even when designed for adults, do not draw on these funds of knowledge and out-of-classroom practices, and instead require a 'willing suspension of disbelief' by learners. Nonetheless, the adult students show a sophisticated level of metacognition and skill in handling the word-problem genre which might indeed be acknowledged as part of their funds of knowledge.

This study explores learners' accounts of what they want from an adult numeracy curriculum, using mind maps to construct and present a 'snapshot' of their current conceptions of the curriculum. Analysis of the resulting maps finds that for most participants, the desired curriculum is constructed in terms of school mathematics. However, for one group, exposed to wider issues of social justice, the curriculum is constructed in terms of situated practice and financial literacy. The discussion draws on Bernstein's theories of curriculum and ideology; Freire's conscientization; and research on adults' motivations for learning numeracy. It is suggested that most learners in this study value the cultural capital associated with school mathematics, and that these learners wish to engage with the challenge set by school mathematics. However, a minority of learners appeared to undergo a process of conscientization, formulating ideas for a numeracy curriculum relevant to adults' lives.

A critical discourse analysis of the Adult Numeracy Core Curriculum is used to expose and challenge the underlying assumptions of the Skills for Life strategy, and to examine the way in which the text constructs subject positions for adult numeracy teachers and learners. The analysis finds that presuppositions include the unproblematic transfer of classroom numeracy learning to social practice, and the need for adults to learn functional numeracy rather than academic mathematics. Teachers are found to be constructed by the text within a deficit model, as needing help, guidance, and instruction, while learners are positioned as also deficient, passive, childlike and 'other'. Learners are excluded from high status academic mathematics and restricted to functional numeracy, and this finding is considered in relation to the theories of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Implications for the coming review of the Skills for Life core curricula are examined, and alternative discourses considered.