Two "grand stories" about good practice in adult numeracy teaching - taking stock of our area

 

Writing my doctoral thesis I had to write a chapter describing the work of the international Research Forum "Adults Learning Mathematics" (ALM) to positioning my own work in this landscape of investigating. For me this was a very difficult task while a lot of my colleagues all over the world already have described the work of ALM in such elegant way, what was more to say? Thus, the work had to be done and I had to find a new way to describe the research field my own work was a part of. Reading through nearly all the proceedings from ALM conferences and several books and chapters in books written by members of ALM concerning adults learning mathematics I was provoked by an argument given by one of my Danish colleagues saying that the heterogeneity of the research field is due to lack of a "grand narrative" concerning adults and mathematics (Wedege, 2001).