There are two excerpts this week from Nathan’s (2021) Foundations for Embodied Learning. In the introduction, the author identifies the central problem of a lack of a coherent, evidence-based educational theory of learning, which leads to ineffective education systems. Nathan argues that learning is a gradual process which occurs across different time scales and that current practices too heavily emphasize and rely on abstract concepts and undervalue embodied forms of learning. The second excerpt focuses on the embodiment of mathematics education and focuses on the role of metaphors in making abstract concepts accessible to more people.
The first 'stop' in the second excerpt for me was about the concept of children coming to school with an understanding that numbers are a place along a path, and the fact that schools assume children know this so they don’t explicitly teach it. It’s easy to forget that this is something that needs to be learned through cultural participation opportunities such as games. On Friday afternoons at my school we hold “Collaborative Response” meetings focused on numeracy in our grades and one of the Grade 1 teachers this week brought forward the issue that one of her students, let’s call her B, has a very poor number sense and can’t “count on” from a number or recognize the conservation of number (Piaget). Nathan explains that many children in Western cultures play these games at home and bring this concept of counting with them when they arrive at school, but there are children who don’t have the same opportunities. When I revisit B with the Grade 1 teacher at next week’s meeting, I’m going to bring forward the idea of games where a piece progresses along a track in order to hopefully provide another strategy to move B’s understanding of number forward.
The second 'stopping point' for me, probably because I am in the midst of geometry exploration right now in my classroom, was Nathan’s section on Geometry. Nathan writes about a student who makes connections to obtuse angles by moving his arms and making connections between the contortion of his body and the angles that he was trying to represent. I have students struggling right now to make the connection between the differing classifications of angles, and want to try to approach this challenge through a more embodied experience. Nathan concludes that grounded and embodied learning experiences can offload some cognitive resources so that students can dedicate more mental energy to the concepts they are trying to learn.
Questions to consider:
1. How might embodied learning impact your teaching strategies, particularly with students who may not have had the same background cultural participation opportunities?
2. How have you or might you incorporate embodied learning experiences to help students struggling with geometric skills and allow them to free up cognitive space to access more abstract concepts?
Using movement can be such a great way for students to internalize their learning. I frequently have students show me how to make numbers in different ways, using their fingers. Although this is an activity that lends itself better to primary students, I love how movement can be used to help students at all grade levels. In the article, Seeing the graph vs. being the graph (Gerofsky, 2011), Gerofsky uses this idea of movement by having students represent graphs using their bodies. Similar to your idea of having students represent various angles, I can also see this as a great way for students to show their understanding of triangles in teams.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, you talk about student B who is struggling with counting on. I was just speaking with a colleague and she was struggling with one of her students whom we can call Student C struggling with the same thing however her student is in grade 4. Often times we see students come to us with are significantly behind in reading, writing and math and it is often a result of intergenerational trauma and parents/grandparents not trusting the school system because their families were in residential schools. I think it's easy to look at a student and be frustrated or annoyed that they have such large gaps but I often find myself reminding my colleagues that the culture and trust is different within the indigenous community we work in than it would be anywhere else. I like the idea that you brought up about the piece moving forward and I am going to pass that on to my friend to see if she could utilize that!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I have an exact moment that I can think of where I have utilized embodied learning to help students with geometric skills but it makes me excited to try it as I have such a wide range of abilities in my class this could be an opportunity where all students feel their needs being met within one lesson. I also think you could easily use embodied learning with many activities such as translations and working with the x and y axis.