ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical reflection of the authors’ journey—both intellectual and geographical—in developing a theory of numeracy. It focuses on the absences and silences in theories about mathematics and mathematics education that have led us to explore and refashion concepts of numeracy and numeracy education in a search for what was missing. It is a story of a number of convergences—of theory and practice of teaching, of mathematics education and mathematics, of “basic” mathematics and “high-powered” mathematics, and of Australasian and Japanese cultures. Our aim in writing this story is as much for our own processes of critical reflection—or as Baker calls it, interrogative practice (Baker, 1998)—as it is for sharing our process of theory generation with mathematics and numeracy teacher educators, researchers, and teaching practitioners. By drawing on the theories we considered and the action research of our own teaching practice, we tell the tale of various milestones we reached and connections we made with theories and developments in other areas such as mathematics education, literacy, critical pedagogy, and, of course, numeracy.
