ENACTING HYBRIDITY IN A HOME-SCHOOL MATHEMATICS ACTIVITY

This paper reports on a ‘photo-and-talk’ activity we conducted with 5-6 year olds to explore how they might connect home/community activity with mathematics This activity was part of a larger project which aimed to understand young children’s mathematical identities, particularly children from poor communities. It builds on our previous work which addressed how school mathematics often alienates learners, resulting in their dis-engagement (Williams 2012). This project considers the origins of such alienation in the first year of formal schooling. Drawing on the ‘funds of knowledge’ approach (Moll et al, 1992), we developed this ‘photo-and- talk’ activity in order to capture the mathematical knowledge/practice young children engage with in their out of school activities. We worked with families and children to create an awareness of every day/home mathematics, in contexts outside of school. We did this by providing each child (and family) with a camera and asking them to take photographs of anything they thought was mathematical in their homes/community. This was subsequently followed up by interviews with the child and their parents (and sometimes siblings), most often in the home, where the child was asked to explain why each photo was considered mathematical and how it connected to their lives. Elsewhere (Black et al, in prep) we have argued that this photo-and-talk activity has potential as a hybrid home-school activity since it brings home/community activity and school mathematics into dialogue, and potentially into hybrid everyday-and-scientific mathematics. In this paper, we explore the nature of this ‘hybridity’ of mathematics further.