Tentativeness as an Affordance in the Mathematics Classroom

• In Event: Division C Section 1C: Technology, Games, and Embodied Learning in Mathematics Education

Abstract

In this paper, I recount an episode from a study of students’ embodied experiences of spatial visualization that focuses on the emergence of the phenomenon of tentativeness as an element of the affordance space in the mathematics classroom. Data was generated with students in a grade 12 International Baccalaureate calculus classroom at a large western Canadian high school. Situated in an enactivist theoretical framework, in which cognition is viewed as arising from the interactions between organisms and the environment, my analysis characterizes tentativeness as both an emergent, participatory quality of problem solving and posing and an affordance that broadens the possibility for adaptive action in an environment.

Author

• Josh Markle, University of Alberta