From the Everyday, through the Inauthentic, to Mathematics: Reflection on the Process of Teaching from Contexts

This paper highlights an attempt by two grade 8 teachers, Bulelwa and Kevin, to draw in the everyday in the teaching of mathematics. Though located in different South African contexts and settings, both teachers tend to enable their learners' access to mathematics by rendering the everyday inauthentic. I argue that inauthenticating the everyday is an unavoidable strategy by which the everyday considerations are silenced and not necessarily teachers' lack of empowerment, as it is sometimes claimed. (Contains 1 figure.) [For complete proceedings, see ED496851.]