The aim of this bachelor thesis is to research how children reflect on their interests in Critical Mathematics Education, based on their dispositions. To answer this question, I investigated what different themes of critical mathematics education children find interesting, and how the children manage to relate mathematic to other contexts. The term critical Mathematics education is in this thesis seen as a form of education that addresses the critical nature of mathematics in our society and aims to provide the pupils with critical and democratic competence. The pupils’ dispositions are described as their backgrounds as well as their foregrounds, where foregrounds are the pupil’s interpretation of their own possibilities for the future.

The collection of data in this study was based of two group interviews with three pupils in each
interview. The children where in the 4th grade. To ask the children about what themes they
found interesting in critical mathematics education, the term was translated to a simpler and
more accessible term for the pupils to relate to. The interview was based on five questions:
“What do you consider an important decision?”, “What do you want to become when your are
old?”, “Is there any important decision you can imagine you have to make in the future?”, “Can
you relate any of these situations to mathematics?” and “Can you relate them to mathematics
education?”.

The results from the interview were that the children had a lot of themes they could relate to
important decisions. Some of these themes where related to environment, elections, inclusion
and exclusion, and social aid. When the pupils were to relate these examples to mathematics
the result either was that the mathematics was only taken from a typical school context, or the
mathematics in their answer was hidden. In these situations, the teacher is responsible to make
the mathematics in these real-life situations visible. The problematic aspects of this task is that
in a lot of the situation could be seen as too complex for the teacher so the mathematics remains
hidden.