Children’s Gestures and the Embodied Knowledge of Geometry

Abstract

There is mounting research evidence that contests the metaphysical perspective of knowing as mental process detached from the physical world. Yet education, especially in its teaching and learning practices, continues to treat knowledge as something that is necessarily and solely expressed in ideal verbal form. This study is part of a funded project that investigates the role of the body in knowing and learning mathematics. Based on a 3-week (15 1-h lessons) video study of 1-s grade mathematics classroom (N = 24), we identify 4 claims: (a) gestures support children's thinking and knowing, (b) gestures co-emerge with peers' gestures in interactive situations, (c) gestures cope with the abstractness of concepts, and (d) children's bodies exhibit geometrical knowledge. We conclude that children think and learn through their bodies. Our study suggests to educators that conventional images of knowledge as being static and abstract in nature need to be rethought so that it not only takes into account verbal and written languages and text but also recognizes the necessary ways in which children's knowledge is embodied in and expressed through their bodies.

Recent research on geometry education: an ICME-13 survey team report

“…Roth and colleagues (Bautista & Roth 2012;Kim, Roth and Thom 2011) have developed a complex set of studies about geometrical objects where the link between the body and the linguistic acts are emphasised up to the discovery of what the authors call sonorous consciousness, as sound has the potential to mark mathematical similarities and distinctions. These 'audible' similarities and distinctions, which may be produced by incarnate dimensions such as beat gestures and prosody, allow children to objectify certain geo-metrical properties of the objects with which they transact.…”

“…Moreover, the analysis shows that sonorous production is intertwined with other dimensions of students' bodily activity. Kim, Roth and Thom (2011) while contesting knowing as a mental process detached from the physical world identified claims that students' gestures support, co-emerge with, cope with and exhibit (embodied and abstract) knowledge of geometry. Morgan and Alshwaikh (2012) reported in an experimental teaching programme making use of a LOGO-like formal language for constructing 3D trajectories and figures in a computer micro-world, a system of similar gestures emerged from the teachers and students to represent different types of movement.…”

Negotiating energy dynamics through embodied action in a materially structured environment

“…Learners in classrooms naturally employ their bodies in the process of making sense of unfamiliar scientific or mathematical phenomena [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48], particularly when they are asked to share their emerging understanding of events with peers [29,[44][45][46][47][48]. Learners' production of gestures may precede their production of technical science words and serve as a developmental stepping stone in the evolution of learners' scientific discourse [47].…”

The role of gestures in making connections between space and shape aspects and their verbal representations in the early years: findings from a case study

“…This multimodal approach of examining mathematical thinking has been adopted by a number of researchers in the past few years (e.g., Arzarello et al 2009;Radford et al 2009) and is in agreement with the theory of embodied cognition which considers bodily experiences as the basis of mathematical understanding and thinking (Nunez et al 1999). According to this latter theoretical position, the body serves as a source and a reference point for building up mathematical concepts (Kim et al 2010). This means that bodily actions, including gestures, are considered to be involved in the process of cognitive change (Goldin-Meadow 2000).…”

“…In mathematics education, only a small number of studies closely investigated the ways in which children use gestures to express their thinking (Kim et al 2010). Therefore, through our study we want to get insight into the phenomenon of gesture and specifically into the role of gestures interacting with verbal representations.…”