Opportunities and Challenges when Students Work with Vocationally Connected Mathematics Tasks

2021

Students in vocational education in Norway take a compulsory mathematics course in the first year of their programme. This course offers opportunities for engaging with mathematics which can be highly relevant to practice in many workplaces. Working with vocationally connected mathematics tasks, tasks designed to draw on students’ future working contexts, is one way of trying to connect to students’ possible future vocations. This study aims to understand how students interact with such tasks with a particular emphasis on the roles of norms, authenticity and students’ positioning between the practices of school, the workplace and everyday life. In this study, I observed students working wit…