When we began to collect data about Adult Education in Spain, with the aim of contributing to the creation of the first product of the Numeric All project, we verified that on this topic – and in the specific field of mathematics teaching – there were by initiating initiatives within the Catalan sphere, but with repercussions at the level of the Spanish state.
In the spring of 2021, CREAMat, the Center for Educational Innovation established by the Generalitat of Catalunya, had already organized three online conferences.
We immediately contacted the people leading the initiative, who responded positively to the proposal to work together.
The next step was the invitation to present the project and the first prototypes of the pop-up exhibition (product 2 of the project) at the ALM29 international conference, which was held in Barcelona in July 2022.
Meanwhile, the local collaboration with Sao, a non-profit entity that deals with EpPA in problematic neighbourhoods of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, some neighbourhood education centres and prisons, and, as mentioned, the CREAMat was already working.
The monthly online meetings allowed us to verify a great coincidence of sensitivity with respect to the topics that the EpPA raises: significance of the educational action in the personal and social sphere, deficit of the curriculum and specific training of teachers, variety of needs and objectives of users, from social integration to the achievement of skills up to the need for a usable qualification. At the same time as the driving force consolidated, new people joined in, bringing very varied and significant experiences, proposals and good practices.
This new structure, which without making it explicit, increasingly took on the characteristics of a Community of Practice, proposed a new cycle of conferences, springtime 2023, in one of which the materials of the Numeric All project were presented to a wider audience made up of teachers and students, in a partly face-to-face and partly online meeting that took place in the Mathematics Museum of Catalonia (MMACA).
We recently took a significant step towards verifying the validity of the materials of the Numeric[All] project during their presentation at the meeting held in Barcelona of the European Numeracy project, also dedicated to the mathematical education of adults.
In the coming months, other equally stimulating events await us, such as the piloting of the latest Numeric[All] products in various adult centres and with multiple teachers in the scientific area, although we would like to have a fruitful exchange with teachers in the humanistic area, convinced that mathematical language, when based on concrete activities close to people’s reality, can be used to acquire communication skills of all kinds.
It will be a further contribution to defining the structure, product and time horizon of the Community of Practice. The idea that we are finishing developing is to design specific training for AE mathematics teachers, both at literacy and higher levels.
We would like to be able to combine the more instrumental needs, often summarized in an increase in calculation ability, with more structural aspects of mathematical thinking: problem solving, recognition of structures, prediction and verification of results, but also with the emotions that mathematics can generate.
We like to think that the results obtained so far, both at the level of international projects and in giving local continuity to the initiatives, demonstrate the validity of the Numeric[All] project and its products.