Chapter 11: Concluding Reflections

The usual approach to publishing and disseminating academic research is through series of relatively brief articles in academic journals. The usual format and style of journal articles strongly encourages a tight focus on a small number of research questions that address a particular aspect of an issue. This compartmentalisation of big questions into concise packaged articles is something that we were reacting against when we decided to start writing this book. While it is possible to write articles about various aspects of children's out-of-school mathematics learning, we feel that this research is fundamentally entwined with the methodological, theoretical, political and practical issues that we have had the space to explore further in this book. We have enjoyed taking the time to engage in depth with some of these issues and to consider how they relate with each other in the conduct of research on out-of-school learning of mathematics. This process has prompted some reflection on what this means in interpreting our own research and what it means for continued work in this field. In this concluding chapter, we explore three of our reflections on the book as a whole and consider how these might inform future work.