WEEK 1 : Reflections
The article I have read is Nathan, M. (2021) Excerpt from Foundations of Embodied Learning pp. 3-7 and 147-151.
Briefly summary:
What I have reading can be divided into 2 parts:
1.
The first part is about the way of learning: embodied learning is a natural human activity, and it is possible to design for it in ways that can inform educational practices and policies in order to usher in a new era of educating the embodied mind.
And it set up 2 examples:
⑴ students actually have very good intuitions about how to think about unknown quantities and generalized relationships between quantities prior to formal instructions.
⑵ society does not value embodied forms of knowing; educators seldom encourage students to engage in any of physical activities to get understanding of subjects.
2. The second part is about grounding metaphor used in mathematics education. It mentioned 3 examples (numbers and operations, algebraic equations, geometry) of mathematics concepts connected with grounding metaphor. It helped illustrates that grounded and embodied learning experiences are power ways to foster mathematical reasoning
3 stops:
1) “Meaning and sense making through personally grounded ways of knowing are not the primary objectives of these scholastic experience. It just matches what students most often say when asked what they are doing in school: ‘I don’t know’.”
I vividly felt this when I graduated from university and started working several years ago. I discovered a deep curiosity about the world, encompassing not just my own field but also areas unfamiliar to me. This active exploration occasionally led me to understand what true learning really is. However, during my school years, I couldn't connect my education with my personal life, leading to an unconscious belief that everything learned in school lost its relevance the moment I stepped off campus.
2) “Encountering
these difficulties in school can have serious long-term implications as well. the
child may develop an identity as someone who is not a mathematics thinker, one
who is not good at using number and operations to reason about quantities and
solve problems.”
I think this phenomenon
happened everywhere, people always be defined or define themselves as “not good
at mathematics” or “girls always have poor abilities in stem”. This, I think ,
stems from the narrow way mathematics is defined in our mind, primarily through
grades marked by school.
3) “What makes mathematics difficult for many people is not their inability to understand the ideas, but to learn the meaning of the formal notation and how it describes these basic and their variants.”
In my previous teaching experiences, I often encountered situations where students struggled to grasp abstract concepts. This led me to spend considerable time planning lessons to ensure clear explanations. To address this, I used realistic examples, which significantly aided their understanding. I realized that students weren't confused by questions rooted in real-world scenarios; their main challenge was understanding why certain concepts were represented in specific ways.
In conclusion, When I used to teach, since I hadn't systematically learned how to teach mathematics, I always recalled why I didn't understand certain things as a child and what exactly I didn't understand. I tried to empathize with my students by putting myself in my younger self's shoes. So, I taught them using the method of combining various imaginative ways I used as a child to remember and understand formulas. I've always been unsure whether such analogies were appropriate for a precise subject like mathematics. However, after going through these readings today, I feel relieved, as it seems I hadn't led my students astray after all.
Question：
Reflecting on Nathan's discussion of 'embodied learning' in 'Foundations of Embodied Learning', how do you think your own experiences in education, either as a student or a teacher, align with or differ from the principles of embodied learning?
I was teaching in India as a math and science teacher. At that time, I used embodied learning in teaching math and science where I used poems, songs, stories and natural environments as mediums of instruction. I could see the clear difference between typical classroom teaching which involves only four walls of the classroom where the teacher acts as an authority and the interactive experiences of students which encourage learning.
回复删除Reflecting on an experience of embodied learning, my mind wanders to moments I walked in nature. I believe, like the philosopher and educator Friere that there is fluidity between the roles of teacher and student. Although I am a "high school teacher" in nature I am a student who learns beyond the cognitive level. As I walk in a forest, all my senses are fully engaged - the chirping of birds and the scent of humus. This learning is not just an intellectual one, it's an immersive sensory experience, and every moment becomes a moment of embodied learning.
回复删除I am thinking about my educational journey from the Indian context, which reflects that most of the time, learning took place in the more rhetorical and traditional sense in order to master the concepts and retain them as long as we could. We often had experiential learning weeks on a certain theme where we expressed our knowledge using various modes like music, plays, songs, and dance forms. Now, I am reflecting that it was indeed the same knowledge but from a different perspective, which revolved around embodied learning. However, due to our rigid education system or curriculum, those learning forms might not be valuable in assessing student’s learning.
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