"Go to the Page and Work It from There" Young People's Experiences of Learning Mathematics from a Text‪.‬

While in many secondary classrooms the textbook remains a central resource for teaching and learning mathematics, its effectiveness is open to question. Drawing on research data from work in progress, this paper argues three things: that there can be a substantial disjunction between the assumptions and content of mathematics textbooks and the knowledge and experiences which students draw on in engaging with those texts; that this disjunction applies particularly to those students who are unsuccessful with this form of learning; and that an alternative approach, extending the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) on communities of practice, offers a more inclusive and effective means of promoting mathematical understanding for such students. Three core assumptions continue to inform the teaching of mathematics in many secondary classrooms: that it is learned from a textbook (Harries & Sutherland, 1999; Shield, 2000), that it is an individual process, and that it is separated from other curriculum areas and activities (Nickson, 2002). In this context, students are restricted to solving routine problems that are broken into discrete steps and isolated from their real world experiences. This form of learning continues to dominate many mathematics classrooms today as they are seen to transmit content that can be tested efficiently (Boaler, 2002), however in doing so, they create barriers for particular groups of students. This paper argues that experiencing mathematics in this way predisposes the formation of a student identity of marginality and non-participation (Wenger, 1998) in mathematics.