Democratizing Mathematics via Embodied Learning and the Arts in a Teaching and Learning Garden

• In Event: Vibrant Earth: Bioculturally Embedded Educational Encounters Catalyzing Earth Regenerative Creativities

Abstract

Purpose: To present findings on the integration of mathematics and the arts in the living outdoor classroom space of a teaching and learning garden, with the aim of increasing engagement and democratizing mathematics learning.

Theoretical Framework: Many learners experience mathematics as an entirely abstract discipline, obsessed with rapid calculations, correct answers and rote memorizations of meaningless formulas (Buerck, 1982; Siegel & Borasi, 2012).

Experiences of this kind are alienating, and convince learners that mathematics has little or nothing to do with the living world, or with experiences of delight, surprise or beauty. Yet for those who love mathematics and pursue it as a vocation, much of the motivation to do mathematics comes from aesthetic pleasure and the enjoyment of surprising and delightful patterns (Dreyfus & Eisenberg, 1986; Rothstein, 2006; Sinclair, 2009; Watson & Mason, 2007). Mathematical patterns both arise from and apply to biological and cultural patterning, but this is seldom evidenced in typical school mathematics classes.
New mathematics pedagogies via the arts and in more natural settings aim to engage diverse learners through multisensory, ecological, embodied and meaningful approaches to the subject (English & Kirschner, in press).

Methods: Through engagement with local and international mathematical-artists-in-residence, teacher candidates and other students and faculty in mathematics education co-developed ways of teaching and learning mathematical patterns in embodied, aesthetic and generative, surprising ways (Kallis, 2014). New pedagogies were introduced and tested through design experiments at the [Blinded place names of two school garden sites in Canada]. A grounded theory approach, with emergent themes arising iteratively from repeated design experiments, provided the means for coding and analyzing aspects of learner engagement and embodied, aesthetic responses to mathematics as approached in this context.

Data: Iterations of new pedagogical and curricular approaches developed for teaching mathematics via the arts in the living garden comprise part of the data. Learners’ writing, artwork, transcribed verbal commentary and blog responses offer evidence of the effects of the enactment of these innovative pedagogies in terms of engagement and democratization.

Results: A wide variety of new mathematical-artistic pedagogies have now been developed for doing embodied mathematics in the garden. (These include the building of hyperboloid trellises and gates from locally harvested bamboo in Figure 4-1; making and developing six-month pinhole camera images tracking the path of the sun from summer to winter solstice in Figure 4-2; using body measurement as a way of connecting modern and ancient forms of measurement and doing estimation; and weaving, braiding, knitting and rope-making with ‘green waste’ materials to explore topics in number theory in Figure 4-3.) Learners showed increased engagement with mathematics, surprise that mathematics learning could take place outside typical structures of textbook exercises and drills, and hope and enthusiasm for a new, regenerative relationship between school subjects and the living world (Ostertag, 2015).

Significance: This study points out the importance of continuing to develop deeper curricular relationships among mathematics, the arts and the living world as a way of dissolving artificial barriers and democratizing mathematics learning.

Author

• Susan Gerofsky, The University of British Columbia