Adults’ mathematics education (AME) as a field of study and practice displays a broad range of settings for teaching and learning, and for research. At the same time, its activities develop in a dynamic context of globalization, competition, and social insecurity. AME is faced with the same struggle for its justification, between humanistic and human capital goals of education, that adult education and lifelong education have been facing over the last half-century. This struggle is reflected in AME practice, research and policy. In this chapter, we formulate critical perspectives for examining AME in these three dimensions with a view to helping ourselves and others to clarify and act in crucial areas. Thus, we examine multiple and contested meanings of key terms like numeracy, and how definitions vary depending on whether they seek to foreground the individual learners’ needs or particular economic imperatives (for example, labour market needs). We illuminate how such variable definitions are experienced by AME learners and practitioners, and how they lead us to problematize ideas such as “the transfer of learning” of mathematics, for example, from school to work, and from formal to non-formal or informal learning situations. It is timely now, when a new international survey of adults’ skills, the OECD-sponsored Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is being conducted, to question what these surveys can tell us for the development of AME as a field, and what alternative questions we need to be pursuing independently.

Intro: Adults, education, Bildung, inequality, lifelong learning, and mathematics are the key terms in the chapter written by Schlöglmann. In the 1990s, he was one of the pioneers that cultivated the borderland between mathematics education, adult education, and vocational education as a subfield of mathematics education research (see Wedege, 2000). Together with Jungwirth and Maasz at the University of Linz, he conducted a large empirical study exploring “the state of mathematics education within the adult education system in Austria” ((Jungwirth, Maasz, & Schlöglmann, 1995, p. 13). In this study, the authors made an important distinction between courses where mathematics is explicitly taught and courses where mathematical concepts and methods are used implicitly. In order to label the latter they constructed the term “Mathematikhaltige Weiterbildung” (trans.: Mathematics-containing continuing education ) presumably to remind people that mathematics in vocational training, as in the workplace itself, is integrated with other subjects and vocational competences. I have claimed that they paved the way, within the scientific domain of mathematics education, for research on vocationally-oriented adult education where mathematics is an integral part (Wedege, 2000).

Vetenskapsrådet har beviljat 4,5 miljoner till det internationella forskningsprojektet Vuxnas matematik: Från arbetet till skolan. Syftet med projektet är att beskriva, analysera och förstå vuxnas informella matematikkompetens och att därigenom skapa en vetenskaplig grund för en positiv förändring av matematikundervisningen i yrkesprogram, övriga ungdomsskolan och vuxenundervisningen.

The dialectics between individual and structure is an important issue in any sociomathematical study of students‘ learning conditions in mathematics education. On the basis of a conception of learning as action and intentionality as a basic element in any action, Skovsmose introduced the notion of the student‘s foreground as an element in critical mathematics education. The intention is to make visible learning obstacles as a political instead of an individual phenomenon based only on the student‘s social and cultural background. In this paper, a discussion is initiated to reestablish the significance of students‘ background by integrating the notion of foreground with Bourdieu‘s theory of habitus as systems of dispositions as principles of generating and structuring practices and representations.

What are the gender issues in mathematics education about and why are they important to study? The purpose of this chapter is to throw light on different aspects of these questions by means of an analytical framework, some statistics and previous research.

Professor Kari Hag, Institutt for matematiske fag, NTNU, fylder 70 år i april 2011. Igennem et langt liv i og med matematik og matematikuddannelse har ligestilling været hendes mærkesag. Det er den konkrete anledning til at jeg sætter køn, matematik og prestige på dagsordenen i dette indlæg.

In the borderland between mathematics education and adult education a new research field has been cultivated, and an international research forum is formed: Adults Learning Mathematics. The subject area encompasses formal adult mathematics education as well as adults’ non-formal mathematics learning in the communities of everyday practice, e.g. the workplace. The key concept is numeracy and the problem field is related to mathematics and lifelong education. Danish researchers have played a role with their theoretical and empirical studies and in their engagement in the international community of research and in international networks and projects. This article presents an overview of Danish research in adults learning mathematics with a focus on the interplay between research and education. These are the key issues: What do adults know; why do adults (not) learn mathematics; why teach mathematics to adults; and how to teach or what is “best practice” in adult mathematics education. The epistemological concept of problematique is used as an analytical tool in this overview.