Introduction

In 1997, forty invited mathematics educators met Jean Lave at the University of Oxford for a day-long seminar during which the possible place of theories of situated cognition in mathematics education was thoroughly aired and explored. A follow-up seminar took place during 1998. This meeting gave rise to a collection of papers (Watson, 1998). Sadly, at the time, no commercial publisher could be found who would publish the collection as an authentic record of the work of the seminar, or within a reasonable time. During the intervening years, some of the papers (e.g. those by Adler, Lerman, Winbourne and Watson) became influential beyond what might be expected from a small print-run. In addition, concepts associated with a situated perspective are now taken-as-shared in mathematics education research. It is time to review the subfield by drawing together a collection of up-to-date work which could be said to have been influenced at some stage by ‘situated cognition’. Many of the authors in this volume participated in the original Oxford seminars and contributed to the collection of papers. In all cases their thinking has moved on and this new collection represents mature, critical, organic perspectives on aspects of mathematics education, framed by political, social and mathematical concerns. In March 2006 most of the authors met at a video-conference to discuss key theoretical issues, and this was followed up with lively electronic discussion. The chapters of this book, while clearly the work of the individual authors or authoring teams, have been peer-reviewed within the team, many of whom communicated with each other throughout the final stages of writing.