The objective of the research project “Adults learning mathematics in school and everyday life” is to establish an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to describe, analyze and understand the conditions of adults’ learning processes – including social and affective aspects. This is to be done both within the frame of formalised mathematics education (school) and as informal mathematics learning in the communities of everyday practice (everyday life). In investigations and theoretical constructions the main stress will be laid on those types of learning processes that are also intended to lead to a vocational qualification, e.g. learning directed toward the labour market.
The perspective in the idea of lifelong learning structuring today’s educational system demands a rupture with the limited conception of learning and knowledge. Individual and collective learning processes don’t only take place as schooling within formalised education, and the focus has to be moved from teaching to learning in the workplace and in everyday life. (Olesen, 2002). This is also the case when learning mathematics is on the agenda. Adults develop to a great extent their mathematics-containing competences and qualifications through participation in communities of everyday practice. Nevertheless, it appears that their beliefs about mathematics are primarily related to their school experiences, and mathematics is experienced by many adults as something that others can do, but that they themselves can’t do (Coben, 2000; Wedege, 2002b). The relevance of mathematics in adult education is often difficult to see for the participants and, together with the interplay between their self-perceptions and beliefs about mathematics, it can increase a general tendency among adults to resistance against learning (Lindenskov, 1996, 2001; Wedege, 1995, 1999; FitzSimons, 2002).
However, the changing demand for adults’ competences and qualifications in functional mathematical skills and understandings (numeracy), as a result of the transition from an industrial society into a knowledge (or information) society, means that many adults assess their missing skills as limiting their possibilities on the labour market (Jensen and Holm, 2000). The distinction ‘non-compulsory’ versus ‘compulsory’ was significant in the past when distinguishing general adult education from the primary and lower secondary school education. Today, with the society’s demands for activation and the labour market’s qualification demands, the participants’ learning in broad adult education is experienced as the field of tension between constraints and needs (Illeris, 2000). This is also why it is important to investigate the objective and subjective relevance of mathematics as a rationale for adults’ learning processes.
The research area for investigation of these problem complexes about adults learning mathematics is cultivated in the border area between research in mathematics education and adult education. Since 1997, the identity of the research field and the development of the theoretical framework has been debated in a topic group at the annual conference of the international research forum “Adults Learning Mathematics” (ALM) (Wedege, 1997; Wedege, Benn, Maasz, 1998; Benn and Wedege, 2001). In Denmark, as well as internationally, there is lack of theoretical constructions to investigate these questions: where, how and why adult men and women do (not) learn mathematics and do (not) change their attitudes to or self-perceptions in relation to mathematics.