It’s helping your child experience the world”: How parents can use everyday activities to discuss maths with their children

This paper presents the findings of the Everyday Maths project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation (UK). The aim of the project was to develop and pilot a series of maths workshops which allowed parents to (i) discover their potentially tacit and taken-for-granted mathematical skills and knowledge, and (ii) explore creative ways for parents to share such skills and knowledge with their children, with the view of enriching mathematical dialogue at home. Unexpectedly, some parents who participated in the project’s workshops engaged in sustained, critical reflection about the very “meaning” of mathematics itself (e.g. by reimaging mathematics as being embodied, sensual, discursive and productive). This had implications for how parents felt they should talk to their children about mathematics. In this paper we illuminate parents changing understanding of “mathematics” by drawing Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist deconstruction. This approach, we argue, helps make parents’ mathematical reflections intelligible and allow us to theorise why and how parents refined mathematics in the way they did.