Dancing Mathematics and the Mathematics of Dance

Selection into, and academic benefits from, middle school dance elective courses among urban youth.

“…However, Lanfredi (2013) examined a small sample of females who engaged in dance training outside of school and they used a visual-spatial thinking measure of math ability; our study estimated the association between in-school dance and a school-administrated comprehensive math assessment. Prior research has noted that learning the kinesthetic of dance outside of the academic classroom (i.e., symmetrical movement and rhythm) can complement the learning of math concepts, and vice versa (Belcastro & Schaffer, 2011).…”

The Future of Embodied Design for Mathematics Teaching and Learning

“…Theorists have argued that grounding abstraction in perceptual-motor-based actions offers an alternative to representing symbols as purely amodal, abstract, and arbitrary symbol systems, where the focus is on interpretation and rote manipulation of symbols (cf. Barsalou, 2008). Principles of grounded and embodied cognition suggest that successful perceptual practice and manipulation of algebraic structures uses cognitive systems that correctly embody mathematical rules and turn action into meaning (Dourish, 2004).…”

“…And yet, by and large, the field of mathematics education research has not investigated the sensorimotor production of physical movement. Being informed of research on how we learn to move in new ways could help us better design, measure, and theorize the enactment of physical movements grounding mathematics learning (Beilock, 2008(Beilock, , 2015belcastro and Schaffer, 2011;Abrahamson et al, 2016a). More broadly, inasmuch as we theorize perceptual-motor activity as constitutive in the development of mathematical cognition, our field should form interdisciplinary communities of educational research that cross traditional boundaries and bring in ideas from scholars in dance, kinesiology, sports science, somatics, and related fields (Mechsner et al, 2001;Thelen and Smith, 2006;Kelso, 2016;Adolph et al, 2018;Sheets-Johnstone, 2018;Cappuccio, 2019).…”

“…The embodiment turn in philosophy entertains a spectrum of perspectives on the mind, which range from relatively conservative views of cognition as amodal cerebral activity grounded on traces of multimodal sensorimotor activity (Barsalou, 2008) to radical views of cognition as, by and large, content-less integrated simulations of multimodal sensorimotor activity Myin, 2013, 2017). The mind, per some of the more pioneering suggestions, is more than the brain organ-it extends from the brain, through the sensing-cumactuating body, and into natural and cultural ecology, where it entangles reciprocally with fellow humans, artifacts, media, and symbolic systems (Hutchins, 1995;Clark and Chalmers, 1998;Melser, 2004).…”

Innovation in education. Commentary: Teaching statistics using dance and movement and a case for neuroscience in mathematics education

“…This naturalistic form of communication is a universal feature in human culture and may have facilitated the development of more complex cognitive processes such as language and even general intelligence (Mithen, 2005 ). Here it is clear that concepts such as geometry and symmetry can be readily mapped to the body shapes that would be practiced with Dance and that these naturalistic physical movements that are practiced in the dance studio can also be mapped to the understating of mathematical concepts (Tahta, 1989 ; Belcastro and Schaffer, 2011 ). Dance may in fact be the mis-en-place type intervention that could facilitate mathematical competence (Irving, 2015 ) 1 .…”