Sociomathematical worlds: investigating children's developing relationships with mathematics

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology used for a three-year ethnographical study of children’s expanding awareness of mathematics and their growing mathematical identities during the middle primary years. It explains how the term ‘sociomathematical worlds’ was adopted to represent the network of social contexts within which children learn about mathematics, and how an understanding of these worlds was constructed by the researcher through a process of broad and detailed data-gathering, rich in triangulation.