Action-Based Embodied Design for Proportions: From the Laboratory to the Classroom

Abstract

Embodied learning technologies have shown efficacy in laboratories with ideal supportive conditions, but their effectiveness in classroom with “real-world” constraints is yet understudied. Inspired by the innovation implementation framework, we compare the classroom-situated engagements of two student pairs and their teachers with the action-based embodied design for proportions with earlier laboratory and classroom study findings and conjecture on influential factors. Much of these classroom students’ sensorimotor learning resembled laboratory findings, but they had more opportunities to be overtly engaged with their hands and self-directed in including artifacts, likely influenced by (unintended) technological changes and setting-specific environmental affordances. Their teachers’ engagements resembled laboratory findings to some extent, but showed less perceptiveness to students’ qualitative multimodal expressions and more directedness in introducing new quantitative forms of engagements, likely influenced by setting-specific fragmented access and novelty of the embodied pedagogy. We discuss the importance of focusing on teachers and conducting semi-natural efficacy research. The impact sheet to this article can be accessed at 10.6084/m9.figshare.21205298.

Transdisciplinary embodied education in elementary school: a real integrative approach for the science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics teaching

“…However, aside from the methodological issues discussed above, some challenges should be alleviated to implement the embodied transdisciplinary (SUMA) educational framework successfully. On the side of teachers, it may be challenging: (a) to promote the value of synthetic understanding of natural and societal phenomena under the same umbrella framework and hence, to motivate their accurate understanding of DST/SP general concepts, as well as the interconnectedness among them, and (b) to stimulate their imagination of creating embodied experiences for students that show 10.3389/feduc.2023.1134823 Frontiers in Education 13 frontiersin.org as critical (Alberto et al, 2022). On the side of students, their personal constraints, such as age, cultural-value background and others, may play a crucial role.…”

Theories and practical perspectives on fostering embodied abstraction in primary school geometry education

“…Although theory does provide us with valuable insights, the fostering of abstraction from an embodied perspective cannot be trained from theory alone. Firstly, because the very nature of an embodiment approach to learning geometry is the acknowledgement of idiosyncratic bodily actions and interactions, which very much contradicts standard teaching practice (Alberto et al, 2022). Secondly, because different geometry problems bring different mathematical models and artifacts and require different (inter)actions.…”