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Week 9: Bead Weaving and Triangles

Highly Unlikely Triangles and Other Impossible Figures in Bead Weaving – Gwen L. Fisher In this paper, Gwen Fisher explores how mathematical ideas can be expressed through bead weaving by creating physical versions of “impossible figures,” such as the Penrose triangle. Impossible figures appear coherent in two-dimensional drawings but cannot exist in three-dimensional space if their edges remain straight and rigid. Fisher shows that by using bead weaving techniques, particularly cubic right angle weave (CRAW), these shapes can be constructed as sculptures because the flexibility of the beads allows the beams to twist and curve. In doing so, the paradox of the impossible triangle is resolved through small structural changes such as quarter twists in the beams. The project demonstrates how mathematical structures, visual perception, and artistic craft can come together to produce new forms of mathematical expression. Stop 1: Mathematics as Material and Craft I stopped reading when Fisher...
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Week 8: Math and Poetry

Artist Interview: JoAnne Growney Sarah Glaz This week’s reading genuinely moved me in a way I didn’t expect. I felt a heaviness reading it, partly because I haven’t had much time to read anything outside academic writing lately. The interview felt intimate and alive. It also pulled me back to my own relationship with writing, especially poetry. I grew up in a household with constant argument and loud noise, and poetry became a kind of quiet shelter for me, a place where I could breathe. One thing I kept thinking about is JoAnne’s long gap in writing. She describes not writing poetry for decades and then returning to it later, around the time her children left home. Even though she downplays parental influence at points, I found myself wondering about the role of life circumstances, timing, and emotional bandwidth. She returned to poetry when she had space again. That made me reflect on my own pause. I stopped writing a few years ago too, and it makes me wonder if writing comes in seaso...
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Week 3 Readings: Dancing Teachers

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Dancing Teachers Into Being With a Garden, or How to Swing or Parkour the Strict Grid of Schooling Susan Gerofsky & Julia Ostertag Summary  Gerofsky and Ostertag argue that schooling is saturated by “the grid” not just in classroom architecture, but in timetables, curriculum, assessment, and even the ways we learn to think. They trace how grids have also functioned historically as tools of territorial control and colonial ordering, and they question the common fantasy that outdoor or garden-based education automatically “escapes” these structures. Instead of rejecting the grid outright, they propose a playful, embodied response: learning to swing with the grid (like jazz rhythms that depend on a strict beat) or parkour it (moving creatively through structures that were designed to constrain movement). Through stories from garden-based teacher education and arts-based practices, they imagine becoming “ecological teachers” by working beside the grid, neither fully inside it nor p...
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Week 2 Readings Multimodality and Mathematical Meaning-Making

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Multimodality and Mathematical Meaning-Making: Blind Students’ Interactions with Symmetry Solange Hassan Ahmad Ali Fernandes & Lulu Healy Summary In Multimodality and Mathematical Meaning-Making: Blind Students’ Interactions with Symmetry, Fernandes and Healy explore how blind students construct mathematical meaning through coordinated bodily, tactile, and imaginative activity. Focusing on geometry, a domain typically treated as inherently visual, the authors examine how two blind students engaged with concepts of symmetry and reflection using tactile tools, hand movements, folding actions, and mental simulation. Drawing on embodied cognition and phenomenology, particularly the work of Merleau-Ponty, the paper argues that mathematical cognition is not confined to the brain or to vision, but is distributed across the lived body and its interactions with the world. Through detailed task-based interviews, the authors show that symmetry was not merely recognized as a visual property bu...
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Week 1 Reading: Gesturing Gives Children New Ideas About Math

Gesturing Gives Children New Ideas About Math Susan Goldin-Meadow, Susan Wagner Cook, and Zachary A. Mitchell Summary In Gesturing Gives Children New Ideas About Math, Goldin-Meadow, Cook, and Mitchell examine how bodily movement, specifically hand gestures, can support children’s mathematical learning. Rather than treating gestures as a way to communicate ideas that learners already have, the authors investigate whether gestures can actually help children develop new mathematical understanding. The study focuses on mathematical equivalence problems, a type of problem that many elementary-aged children struggle with because they often interpret the equals sign as a signal to “add everything up” rather than as a statement of balance. The study involved a relatively large sample of 128 third- and fourth-grade children, all of whom failed to solve any of the target problems correctly on a pretest. Children were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a correct-gesture condition, a p...
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Draft Project Outline and Annotated Bibliography

Name: Sushmita (Sushi) Roy (working individually) Project Title: The Terrace Garden Morning: Teaching Measurement, Classification, and Spatial Reasoning Through Outdoor Plant Care in an Anganwadi Setting Grade Level / Age: Ages 3–6 (preschool/foundational stage) Context: Anganwadi centre (India's public early childhood care and education system) serving children from rural and peri-urban households in Rajasthan, India. Designed for an Anganwadi worker facilitating a mixed-age group of approximately 15–20 children with minimal purchased materials. Brief Description This project designs a 45-minute outdoor activity sequence centred on terrace/courtyard garden care — a routine already present in many rural Indian households — that integrates measurement, classification, proportional reasoning, and spatial thinking through embodied, arts-based, and outdoor approaches. The mathematical focus is measurement using non-standard units, with classification and spatial reasoning woven in as s...
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Week 7 Readings

Reading: Circular Movements of Healing with Maths, Arts and Craft: Reimagining disciplinary transversals for learning Stop 1 One place where I paused was the way the authors talk about healing not as something dramatic or therapeutic, but as something that happens when learning is allowed to slow down. The repeated emphasis on circularity, returning, lingering, walking, making, touching felt very intentional. Healing here isn’t about correcting misunderstandings or improving performance. It’s about undoing fear, shame, and alienation that many people carry into mathematics, often from very early on. This landed very personally for me because it mirrors what I’m seeing in households during my fieldwork. Children aren’t anxious about numbers or patterns when they encounter them in daily life. The anxiety enters later, usually through schooling. In homes, learning happens in loops: you watch, you try, you mess up, you try again. No one rushes to name the concept. No one evaluates you mid-...
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