ABSTRACT
In the last several years, Jean Lave and Valerie Walkerdine have developed searching analyses and critiques of mathematics education, particularly in their books Cognition in Practice and The Mastery of Reason. Walkerdine developed a set of conceptual tools for analyzing the activities within which authoritative adults manage to discover the child they are looking for. The contrast between Lave’s and Walkerdine’s theories seems so irreconcilable in part because of the contrasting details of their case studies. Lave focused on adults in their largely solitary and self-directed activities; she wants to provide a vocabulary to describe the structure of those activities and the history through which they acquired that kind of structure. Given that both authors are concerned with the relationship between school and nonschool activities, both of their theories would benefit from more extensive analyses of the cultural and practical resources that children carry with them in each direction.
