"Go to the page and work it from there" young people's experiences of learning mathematics from a text

While in many secondary classrooms the textbook remains a central resource for teaching and learning mathematics, its effectiveness is open to question. Drawing on research data from work in progress, this paper argues three things; that there can be a substantial disjunction between the assumptions and content of mathematics textbooks and the knowledge and experiences which students draw on in engaging in those texts; that this disjunction applies particularly to those students who are unsuccessful with this form of learning; and that an alternative approach, extending the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) on communities of practice, offers a more inclusive and effective means of promoting mathematics understanding for such students.