Abstract

In this seminar I will be talking about the Everyday Maths Project – a 2 year project funded by the Nuffield Foundation. We set out to explore ways to help parents find ways to support their children’s mathematics learning that avoided some of the difficulties of school-centred approaches to parental involvement. I will focus on a series of workshops that we designed and carried out for parents in four primary schools. The aim of the workshops was to help parents ‘find the maths’ in their everyday family activity, and to explore ways to share this with their children. We were able to record significant transitions in parents’ thinking as the workshops progressed, around the ways that they thought about mathematics and around the ways that they thought about their roles in their children’s education. The seminar will be an opportunity to think about ways in which challenging school-centred models of parental involvement in education can provide opportunities for learning that can otherwise be hard to find.