Values that Occasion and Guide Mathematics in the Family

Abstract

Research on math in daily contexts has upended a view of mathematics as a primarily school-based set of tools and practices. Mathematics is embedded in a wide variety of activities—dairy workers filling orders (Scribner, 1984); dieters solving fraction problems in the kitchen or unit price problems when grocery shopping (de la Rocha, 1985; Lave, 1988); Brazilian children figuring profit while selling candy (Nunes, Schliemann, & Carraher, 1993; Saxe, 1990); high school basketball players figuring shooting percentages (Nasir, 2000); and nurses calculating drug doses (Hoyles, Noss, & Possi, 2001). Throughout these cases, the approaches people take to the problems emergent for them in their practices are not constrained by school algorithms. They instead exploit contextual features of the material and social environments and flexibly integrate the pursuit of nonmathematical goals, such as minimizing effort or time, into problem-solving (Pea, 1993). One important contribution of this work is to document when and how mathematics occurs in everyday cultural practices, thereby offering a counterpoint to an educational research focus on schooling and standards-based curricula. For our purposes, an even more valuable contribution of such investigations is their foregrounding of foundational problems in how people learn and employ cultural tools (like mathematics) as they engage in the emergent problems of everyday life. Specifically, this work offers hope for a better understanding of learner orientations to the content and processes of mathematical problem-solving.