Embodied Mathematical Imagination and Cognition: Professional Development for Undergraduate Mathematics Instructors

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This workshop will enable mathematics instructors to build new knowledge and skills in an emerging area of STEM education research known as embodied mathematical imagination and cognition (EMIC). A sample illustration of the idea of EMIC entails having learners move their bodies in a way that represents an underlying mathematical concept such as rotation. Similarly, learners might manipulate other physical objects to represent more complex transformations; and the idea extends to virtual manipulations and simulations. This area of research has informed the design and creation of new resources, activities, and methodologies that can promote teaching and learning of a breadth of mathematical content, including concepts such as ratio, slope, and frequency, or tools to express equality or other algebraic relationships, or even theorems from geometry and complex analysis. Through this professional development experience undergraduate mathematics faculty and graduate students will weave ideas from the recently published Mathematical Association of America Instructional Practices Guide with EMIC research results. The fifty participants of this two and a half-day workshop will (1) become familiar with EMIC research, (2) engage in a variety of EMIC activities, (3) create/build EMIC activities and materials for their own classrooms, including lesson plans and assessment strategies, and (4) seed a national community of practice of EMIC-informed undergraduate mathematics instructors. Selected products will be available to the wider mathematics education community via a website created for this project. The workshop presents an opportunity to bridge research and practice at the collegiate level by introducing faculty to embodied activities and related research as well as providing a space to create their own activities that meet the needs of their own students. These embodied activities offer promise to help learners delve deeply into mathematical ideas that may sometimes be obscured by the algorithms and procedures they are taught. The workshop will also allow the project team to increase the number and diversity of the community of investigators who are bridging research and practice related to embodied cognition and design.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.