This article discusses issues concerning the appropriation of numeracy practices by young and adult students of primary and secondary schools. We consider these social practices that involve mathematical ideas, criteria and representations to be literacy practices, constituted by ways of using written language and informed by the relations that they establish with the values and knowledge of written culture. We analyze the discursive positions taken by subjects in classroom interactions during the correction of a mathematics activity in which students were requested to indicate the order of magnitude of some objects and the expression of their approximate measurements using the decimal metric system. While the school proposal required the production of estimates at the expense of reference in specific situations, students produced responses referenced in contextual situations and tried to be precise. Our analysis suggests that the learning processes of school numeracy practices are not restricted to a technical dimension, and are related to the ways subjects learn the values linked to them. In the educational discursive interplay, students take various positions, which sometimes sympathize with the school's ways of knowing, and sometimes question them. Thus, students act as subjects of learning in several ways of knowing and relating to the world.
Numeracy; Literacy; Appropriation; Learning; Youth and adult education