In 2016 the Swedish fritidshem got its own curriculum where mathematics is formally introduced. The space where students can experience informal forms of mathematics in activities derived out of their own interest risks being slowly transformed into a schoolified form of mathematics, steered by teachers and striving for learning effectiveness. A policy enactment perspective was used to investigate the material, interpretive and discursive dimensions of the enactment process. Based on document analysis, observations and interviews in two cases, tensions between two different and competing discourses were identified: one driven by student’s interests and one driven by teacher’s mathematical agenda. The meaning of fritidshem math will configure in the tensions about what counts as desirable forms of mathematical activity in practice.

Elever möter matematik i många sammanhang, så som i vardagen, i fritidshemmet och i skolan. Ett viktigt sammanhang för matematiska möten är fritidshemmets undervisning. Fritidshemmet är en frivillig del av utbildningssystemet och styrs av policy-dokument, där läroplanen ingår. 2016 reviderades den nationella läroplanen i Sverige, Lgr 11, och matematik lyfts explicit som ett innehåll som ska behandlas i fritidshemmets undervisning. En utgångspunkt för detta kapitel är att undersöka vad som karaktäriserar fritidshemmets matematiska aktiviteter och kontexter. Det finns en risk att fritidshemmets matematik omintetgörs om den inte problematiseras och en farhåga är att den matematik eleven traditionellt möter i skolan ges utrymme och breder ut sig i fritidshemmet. I kapitlet lyfts fritidshemmets specifika matematiska arena fram. Med hjälp av teoretiska verktyg hämtade från policystudier samt två matematikdidaktiska perspektiv studeras fritidshemmets matematik genom en flerfallstudie. Resultatet synliggör fyra inriktningar av fritidshemmets matematik; helinformell, halvinformell, halvformell och helformell.

Based on an empirical study of policy enactment and mathematical enculturation in Swedish school-age educare, a conceptualization of mathematics as the assemblage of activities and values is proposed. Observations were analysed using policy enactment theory and the lens of mathematical activities. The result shows that making creations, describing relationships and addressing problems are mathematical activities evident in the practices of school-age educare. Values of plausibility, critical stance and connectedness are evident. This alternative conceptualization of mathematics offers possibilities for respecting a balance between education and care in practice. The result opens for alternative ways of thinking about mathematics as a complementing and compensating area that resists the tendency towards schoolification in educare.

Based on a posthumanist perspective, this article examines how mathematics emerges in the practice of Swedish school-age educare, fritidshem. This educational offer has a focus on complementing and compensating school and on providing meaningful leisure before and after the regular school-day. As a change of policy in 2016 explicitly attention to some content areas such as mathematics were introduced. How practitioners would interpret, translate and enact “mathematics” in their practice emerged as a concern for research. The overall aim is to explore the phenomenon of mathematics in the practice of school-age educare. The two researchquestions to be explored in this article are: how can mathematics as a phenomenon emerge in the school-age educare? And, in what ways can a specific manner of gazing mathematics as an event contribute, when one acknowledges the event as created in entanglement within the material-discursive practice?  The phenomenon is elaborated by setting in operation some theoretical tools from posthumanism, enculturation and mathematics as event. In particular, the adoption of posthumanism perspective, agential realism allows a shift from a child-centered perspective to a perspective that privileges the intricate connection with human and non-human materials in entanglement. Materiality refers to matter as books, chairs, students, adults, bodies and many other “things”. All materials can become performative agents within material-discursive intra-actions with power to act. The way materials come to intra-act relates to the material-discursive practice that is culturally formed in the context of the school-age educare. Discourse and materialities shape each other and become entangled within intra-actions. The empirical basis of the study is a field work in two school-age educare centres. Observations in the practice captured in video recordings and memo-notes were organized as data that provided a foundation for the analysis. To make sense of the data, an inspiration of a diffractive reading has made it possible to bring together the theoretical tools, the empirical data, research in the area and the researcher’s own experience. Through a way of reading different data together in an assembly reading, samläsning, differences and patterns within data emerges.  As a result of the assembled reading a variant of mathematics as event became visible, the notion of mathemat-ing (in Swedish matematik-a). The result indicates that performative entanglement of agential matters, human and non-human, enables the mathemat-ing to emerge. The concept of mathemat-ing is closely connected to the discourses of play-ing in the sense that the game or play are being created in present time within a material-discursive practice. Nothing, or no one are foregrounded in the formulation of mathemat-ing, mathematical relationships and ideas become new within material-discursive intra-actions. This conceptualization of mathemat-ing directs attention to “being” as well as “becoming” in material engagement where creation and play provide opportunities of spending time in mathematical intra-actions. It refers to the emergence of mathemat-ing events where designing, locating, counting, playing, measuring and explaining appear within the material-discursive intra-actions. As a result, mathemat-ing moves the educational gaze away from a concern for the child’s development and performance. By affirming mathemat-ing, children can feel more comfortable with sensing other relationships about what the mathematical may mean. For the practice of school-age educare, this approach highlights the importance of how materialities are presented to facilitate the generating of different possible mathematical events.