Primary school teachers’ practices for fostering embodied abstraction in geometry

Abstract

Where embodied cognition perspectives are on the rise in mathematics education, little is known on how mathematics teachers can foster embodied learning. Especially when aiming for abstraction by students, knowledge on embodied teaching practices lags behind. This paper focuses on teaching practices that might assist primary school teachers in fostering embodied learning in geometry, specifically embodied abstraction, a process by which learners verbalize and reflect on performed actions and observed structures. To this end, a case study involving two teachers was carried out, with the aim to set up an inventory of embodied teaching practices. The teachers participated in a training program. The results show seven teaching practices (four inspired from literature and three inspired from data) and illustrate how these are adopted. Teachers use students’ multimodal expressions as a starting point for intervention, interpretation and discussion. They direct students’ perception to emerging structures (attentional anchors) by referring to the action space and previous experiences. Sometimes teachers slide back to teacher-oriented practices when describing and introducing mathematical structures they distinguish themselves. Overall, participation in the training program on embodied learning enhanced their awareness of students’ multimodal behavior and their own teaching practices aimed at fostering abstraction.