CONFERENCIERS

• Dor Abrahamson, Professor of Mathematics education, Berkely Graduate  School of Education / EDRL

Link to the presentation (slides) and to the recorded talk

 Towards an Enactivist Mathematics Education: A Design-Based Research Program

Embodiment is a recent paradigm in the philosophy of cognitive science. It questions beliefs driving 20^th century research on the human mind, which assumed that knowledge is constituted as representations held in the brain. Instead, embodiment promulgates an alternative fundamental hypothesis. Knowledge is not a ‘thing’ but, rather, a ‘doing’ —  knowledge, that is, knowing, is the individual’s capacity for dynamic perceptuomotor enactment. And this enactment is ecologically situated — it is in the world as much as it is in the body: Knowledge is an adaptive phycological form of engaging the environment in anticipation of accomplishing vital interactions. What would this mean for educational practice? For example, what could possibly be the embodiment or enactment of so-called abstract ideas, like justice, photosynthesis, or algebra? What is the teacher’s role in embodied designs for learning? The talk will describe my lab’s educational design-based collaborative research on mathematical learning, and how we came to conceptualize perception as a key psychological construct in the analysis and promotion of content learning. I will also explain how an embodiment perspective transforms our thinking about developing instructional resource for students with diverse sensorimotor capacities

• Ferdinando Arzarello, Professor of Mathematics education, Università degli Studi di Torino, UNITO · Dipartimento di Matematica "Giuseppe Peano"

Link to the presentation (slides) and to the recorded talk

 The multifaceted aspects of multimodality through semiotic lenses

It is well known that visual perceptions, actions and interactions with tools and didactic contexts, and narratives elaborated in the classroom are fundamental in teaching/learning activities. Their fine-level analysis within the interaction between students, and between students and the teacher, allows for an in-depth understanding of the teaching-learning processes. From this micro-analysis it is possible to draw some general considerations of a didactic nature (macro-analysis), which can guide the teachers in the work of educational planning.

These points will be introduced with examples from the author team’s research and will conclude with some questions for the ESMEA team to be discussed in the meeting.

• Jorge Soto-Andrade, Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, and Associated Researcher, Center of Advanced Research in Education, University of Chile.

             Link to the video of the presentation

 Embodiment, enaction and metaphorisation in math and science education.

We discuss how embodied cognition, more generally 4E cognition, and metaphorisation can inform math and science teaching. We recall first the central tenets of embodied cognition, of cognition as enaction (per Varela) and metaphorisation, which we fathom as a fundamental biological rather than linguistic process. We then describe and comment on some concrete examples related to the teaching and learning of abstract mathematical concepts and properties, in geometry and probability, which also involve physical metaphors. We finally discuss the implications of an embodied-enactive-metaphorical approach to an integrated math and science education, which could in particular work as an antidote to the widespread cognitive abuse usually involved in traditional teaching of mathematics at the primary and secondary level.

• Magdalena Kersting, Assistant Professor of Science Education, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  

link to the presentation (slides and associated resources) and to the recorded talk

Body of Knowledge: The Role of Embodiment in Science Education

The duality of science – its reach for the abstract while remaining anchored in the concrete – sets the stage for why science and science education, by extension, is a crucial arena for embodied cognition. Indeed, science education research is ideally suited to test theoretical claims about the embodied underpinnings of cognition empirically. In this talk, I present an overview of how the body bears on science learning. To illustrate these overarching perspectives, I draw on case studies in modern physics to discuss how embodiment enables and restricts the abilities of learners to think scientifically.

• Luis Radford, Professor of Mathematics Education, École des sciences de l'éducation de l'Université Laurentienne, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada
  

Link to the video of the presentation

 Situating embodiment in learning processes: A dialectical materialist perspective           

 In this talk I sketch a dialectical materialist perspective on learning and discuss the role that embodiment plays therein. Moving away from constructivist and (old and new) empiricist and materialist accounts of body and embodiment, this dialectical materialist perspective leads to a non-dualistic, non-subjectivist, and non-rationalist conception of knowledge and learning. Occurring in cultural-historical activities, learning is conceived of as  an embodied, discursive, semiotic, material, and affective encounter with knowledge (mathematical, scientific, artistic, etc.). Learning appears as an unavoidably social process embedded in webs of power and meaning and, hence, always driven by contradictions and negations. The educational task consists here in engaging with teachers and students in envisioning and implementing teaching-learning activities that foster deep critical and conceptual understandings, promotes new forms of social consciousness, and nurtures supportive and inclusive ethical experiences.

• Donata Schoeller, Guest Professor at the University of Iceland, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Koblenz

Critical thinking and embodied cognition

Thinkers of different disciplines, across centuries, give accounts of a process in which novel ideas or perspectives emerge slowly, needing time, a kind of stubbornness (or patience) and certain conditions. The process is strange because there is a kind of knowing and not-knowing involved: one senses (thinks/feels/experiences) something which one cannot yet make sense of. One means something which one cannot yet easily say. Under the premises of disembodied, representational theories of mind, this kind of process is impossible to grasp. By uncovering the felt dimensions of cognition, the turn to embodiment in the cognitive sciences and philosophy sheds a new light on this slow enactment of novel ideas and perspectives, thus suggesting a link between embodiment and creative-critical thinking. Being able to think beyond habituated models and theories, beyond the “power of discourses,” seems to imply the ability to access, and symbolically interact with, situated and experiential sources of felt and experienced meaning which are vastly entangled, fuzzy,  and capable of opening up frameworks of thinking on personal, cultural or paradigmatic scopes.