Tine Wedege

Commentary on Schlöglmann’s chapter, "Mathematics education for adults: Can it reduce inequality in society?"

Adults, education, Bildung, inequality, lifelong learning, and mathematics are the key terms in the chapter written by Schloglmann. 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 et al. 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” (translation: “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. Elsewhere I claimed that within the scientific domain of mathematics education they paved the way for research on vocationally oriented adult education, where mathematics is an integral part (Wedege 2000).

Commentary on Modalities of a Local Integration of Theories in Mathematics Education

Connecting theories is an activity in the practice of many mathematics education researchers. Broadly speaking the theories—or theoretical perspectives—being connected come from within the field of mathematics education (“home-brewed” theories) or from outside (psychological, sociological, anthropological; philosophical, linguistic etc. theories), and they come from the same discipline or from different disciplines. As a consequence the researcher needs methods and strategies for connecting theories. Prediger et al. (2008) have taken the “first steps towards a conceptual framework” with a terminology—or a meta-language—for dealing with this issue. The terminology, which is based on the work in the Theory Working Group of CERME, presents strategies for connecting theories as pairs of strategies (understanding others/making understandable; contrasting/comparing; coordinating/combining; synthesizing/integrating locally) within a scale of degree of integration from “ignoring other theories” to “unifying globally”.