To know or not to know – mathematics, that is a question of context

As one of the so-called basic skills, 'mathematics' or 'numeracy' is at the top of the list of subjects in adult education programmes. Together with political investment in general and further education, practitioners and theoreticians focus on 'knowing and learning in different contexts'. Jean Lave's theory about 'situated learning' may be regarded as a confrontation with the idea of learning as acquisition of propositional knowledge. One characteristic of adult education in mathematics is that the participants bring with them adult life experience from their everyday and work. Another characteristic is their perspective in educating themselves. There is an apparent contradiction between many adults being blocked in relation to mathematics in formal settings and being competent in their everyday life. It is possible to make sense of this contradiction by analytically expanding the context for knowing and learning mathematics from the participants' experiences and perspectives to also include the adults' dispositions, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' as a guiding principle for practice. By interpreting the account of her life by a 75 year old woman concerning her attitudes to mathematics, the author illustrates and discusses the two analytical concepts ('situated learning' and 'habitus') and their suitability for analysing adults knowing or not-knowing mathematics in different situation contexts.

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