Entrance Slip: Embodied Knowing
The clearest way that I can envision using embodied knowing in a classroom is to build confidence. Based on the reading, a message I picked up, was that many people have an innate sense of math and spatial reasoning that they are unaware of.
And from there it is only a matter of translating that innate sense of knowing into a structured sense of knowing. It is like tapping into a source of knowledge that already exists within a student or individual, but they haven't learned to harness it yet. This could go both ways, whether someone has a strong grasp of math but think they lack creativity or someone who believes math understanding is out of reach.
There was a great moment in the reading, part of Daina's story, that said: "But then I realized it was only the techniques I did not know."
This quote is so striking to me because it hits very close to home. As a student in math and theatre, I am constantly told "wow, it's so great that you also have the ability to understand math" by theatre folks, or "wow, it's so great that you also have that creative mind" by math folks, or some variation. But in my mind, it isn't like that at all. Math and theatre are very similar to me, but I have studied the techniques of both. My processes in creating theatre and in solving math are very similar logically, and both require a lot of creativity, but the tools are different. Certainly, the two subjects offer different feelings: one satisfies a need for order and solving puzzles, and the other is very emotionally and culturally fulfilling, but they both require a creative approach to solving problems.
All of that is to say, I believe that many students have something within them that naturally understands math and patterns, but they lack techniques. And those techniques aren't practised because the students lack confidence. It is very easy, with the way math is portrayed in society, for students to believe math is something that is either understood or isn't.
Embodied knowing in the classroom might look like challenging students to make estimates and to react to spatial problems physically and without precise mathematical tools. And then have them test these intuitions and see what they discover. Maybe these explorations would be like building structures or piecing together tangrams, or maybe it would be about the space they move around in, perhaps guessing how long it takes to walk across a field.
I think students would be surprised to see how quickly they might pick things up. And once students are feeling confident about the embodied knowing, the teacher can start bringing it back to concrete techniques, and the students will be able to practice, knowing that deeper understanding is attainable.
And from there it is only a matter of translating that innate sense of knowing into a structured sense of knowing. It is like tapping into a source of knowledge that already exists within a student or individual, but they haven't learned to harness it yet. This could go both ways, whether someone has a strong grasp of math but think they lack creativity or someone who believes math understanding is out of reach.
There was a great moment in the reading, part of Daina's story, that said: "But then I realized it was only the techniques I did not know."
This quote is so striking to me because it hits very close to home. As a student in math and theatre, I am constantly told "wow, it's so great that you also have the ability to understand math" by theatre folks, or "wow, it's so great that you also have that creative mind" by math folks, or some variation. But in my mind, it isn't like that at all. Math and theatre are very similar to me, but I have studied the techniques of both. My processes in creating theatre and in solving math are very similar logically, and both require a lot of creativity, but the tools are different. Certainly, the two subjects offer different feelings: one satisfies a need for order and solving puzzles, and the other is very emotionally and culturally fulfilling, but they both require a creative approach to solving problems.
All of that is to say, I believe that many students have something within them that naturally understands math and patterns, but they lack techniques. And those techniques aren't practised because the students lack confidence. It is very easy, with the way math is portrayed in society, for students to believe math is something that is either understood or isn't.
Embodied knowing in the classroom might look like challenging students to make estimates and to react to spatial problems physically and without precise mathematical tools. And then have them test these intuitions and see what they discover. Maybe these explorations would be like building structures or piecing together tangrams, or maybe it would be about the space they move around in, perhaps guessing how long it takes to walk across a field.
I think students would be surprised to see how quickly they might pick things up. And once students are feeling confident about the embodied knowing, the teacher can start bringing it back to concrete techniques, and the students will be able to practice, knowing that deeper understanding is attainable.
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