In their lecture titled Boundary Task: Theorising and designing a new educational device for vocational mathematics education, Dr. Giulia Giovanna Bini and Teresa Calogera addressed boundary crossing between different subjects and contexts by teachers and students.

Abstract: Boundary Task: Theorising and designing a new educational device for vocational mathematics education

This presentation introduces the conceptualisation and theoretical grounding of the Boundary Task (BT), a new educational device designed to address the teaching and learning of mathematics in vocational education. Anchored in the frameworks of Boundary Objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989) and Boundary Crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011), the BT was developed in response to the observed gap between school mathematics and the situated knowledge practices of vocational students. Drawing on literature from mathematics education and practices from professional learning (Bakker et al., 2012; Boistrup & Lindberg, 2020; FitzSimons, 2014), the study defines a set of design principles—both semiotic and semantic—guiding BT construction. These principles aim to foster cognitive reorganisation, embodied engagement, and the autonomous mobilisation of mathematical meanings within contexts initially perceived as non-mathematical.

The design process requires a first-level boundary crossing among teachers from different disciplinary areas, whose collaboration enables the identification and reformulation of meaningful mathematical content within professional domains. In the implementation of the task, students are then invited to engage in a second-level boundary crossing, negotiating and reconstructing connections between school and workplace knowledge. The BT thus emerges as a flexible and transferable device, supporting mathematical sense-making across domains and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration in both classroom and teacher education contexts. The first implementation of the BT was carried out in 2025 in a vocational training school for future cooks and bartenders, at the boundary between mathematics and professional culinary practice, with proportional reasoning as the central mathematical content. This experience constitutes the initial cycle of a design-based research process, with the dual aim of improving the design and broadening the related theoretical understanding.

The presentation on 4 December 2025 is part of DeLect, the December lecture series hosted by Prof. Dr. Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs and Dr. Alexa Brase for the DBR Network in collaboration with EDeR – Educational Design Research. The idea behind the series is to provide insight into DBR projects by experienced researchers from various disciplines and to highlight topics of interdisciplinary relevance. If you have an idea for a presentation, please contact us at dbr.hul@uni-hamburg.de.