The role of everyday mathematics in parent and caregiver experiences of alienation from school mathematics

Abstract Existing research has highlighted how many parents from ‘oppressed’ communities feel alienated from schooling and particularly from school mathematics—the ‘arbitrary’ curriculum often has little apparent relevance to everyday life. The Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach has sought to address this by surfacing rich resources in parents’ and children’s everyday lives in their communities (e.g., mathematics embedded in everyday social practices such as managing poverty) that can be integrated with the school mathematics curriculum. However, in our previous work, we have critiqued mainstream FoK-based work by highlighting its tendency to surface cultural and educational capital, i.e., knowledge or practices that offer families symbolic value in schooling but do nothing to challenge the inequalities this reproduces. In our work, we extend the FoK concept and ‘educational capital’ to include the ‘cultural commodity’—a concept that refers to forms of knowledge/knowing that manifest the contradictory relation between exchange and use value. This invokes a more dialectical analysis that can help to identify knowledge/knowing that offers potential for change or transformation of social inequalities. This paper offers empirical evidence that ‘cultural commodity’ is a useful tool for research with parents that aims to connect such mathematics in the everyday with school mathematics that has developmental potential. Furthermore, the findings illustrate how and why the parent-researcher role might be crucial in generating moments that have such potential. We speculate that such brokering is necessary to challenge the arbitrary function and exchange value of school mathematics and imagine an alternative use value.