One of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been restrictions on mobility and thus the closure of schools. This has had consequences on the teaching strategies of primary mathematics educators who were not familiar with online education. Most schools in Chile have adopted virtual and hybrid classes to continue educational processes. From a quantitative approach with a sample of n = 105 primary school educators and through an online survey, we analyzed how educators implemented the mathematics curriculum during the pandemic using various didactic strategies and educational resources, as well as their respective contexts. The results show that there is a relationship between the level of technical knowledge of teachers, the years of experience, and the types of teaching strategies they use. Likewise, differences were found between educators in rural and urban sectors according to the use of teaching strategies and the types of educational resources used. Regarding the didactic strategies, it is shown that the emerging strategies most used are metaphorical and analogical, whereas in traditional strategies the automation of procedures is imposed. The implications for practice include suggestions and guidelines for improving the training and professional development of mathematics teachers including increasing and strengthening the number and quality of teachers’ didactic strategies and online pedagogical management skills and promoting metacognition through virtual forums. Finally, we discuss the context of the use of didactic strategies in mathematics during the pandemic, analyzing its challenges and opportunities.
STEM and STEAM education promotes the integration between science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the arts. The latter aims at favoring deep and collaborative learning on students, through curricular integration in K-12 science education. The enactive and ecological psychology approach to education puts attention on the role of the teacher, learning context and socio-cultural environment in shaping lived learning experiences. The approach describes education as a process of embodied cognitive assemblage of guided perception and action. The latter process depends on the interaction of learners with digital and/or analogue learning affordances existing within the socio-technological environment. This article proposes that the scope of an enactive-ecological approach can be extended to the domain of learning science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), especially when it comes to understanding deep roots of the learning process. We first present an exhaustive literature review regarding the foundations of both the enactive and the ecological learning theories, along with their differences and key similarities. We then describe the fundamentals and latest research advances of an integrated STEAM pedagogy, followed by the notion of mixed reality (XR) as an emerging educational technology approach, offering an understanding of its current foundations and general disposition on how to understand digital immersion from ecological psychology. Next, we propose a systems theoretical approach to integrate the enactive-ecological approach in STEAM pedagogy, framed in the Santiago school of cognition attending to the interactive dynamics occurring between learners and their interaction with learning affordances existing within their educational medium, establishing that sensorimotor contingencies and attentional anchors are important to restrict sensory variety and stabilize learning concepts. Finally, we consider two empirical studies, one from Chile and the other from New Zealand, in which we demonstrate how the enactive-ecological approach built upon a systems theory perspective can contribute to understanding the roots of STEAM learning and inform its learning design.
Creativity is considered one of the skills crucial for 21 Century to face the challenges proposed by the 2030 education agenda (Frey & Osborne 2013; OECD, 2018, Reimers & Chung 2019). In our reading, active methodologies such as project-based learning and design thinking are often seen as fundamental in favoring creativity together oriented towards individual, social, and planetary well-being (UN, 2022). A persistent problem for the training of 21st century skills, in which creativity, intellectual openness and computational thinking are essential in teacher training, is the adherence to cognitivist foundations and conventional methodologies. The traditional cognitivism has reduced the notion of creativity in processes and products. In our proposal, we want to redirect the question about what happens in the head (process) or in the world that makes people creative (world), rather, we invite creativity to be considered as a skillful experience embedded in a context and that arises from sensorimotor engagement and distributed perception (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Hutchins 1995; Kalaydjian et al 2022). In this sense, we propose the 4E cognition approach (embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended) as a necessary theoretical and empirical framework to guide the understanding of creativity in contexts of active methodologies. Project-Based Learning and Design Thinking teacher education often fosters creativity as a deep experience that emerges in engagement with artifacts and interaction with others, opening unprecedented possibilities for capturing emerging understanding and enhancing skillful performance in challenging tasks (Videla, Veloz and Pino, in press). However, active methodologies such as project-based learning and design thinking are hardly linked to contemporary paradigms of cognition that are anti-representationalist, embodied, and situated in sociocultural contexts. The 4E approach argues that cognition is intertwined with the world because of a history of structural couplings, that is, the contingent relationships that stage skillful performance in response to the situational sense of sensorimotor engagement with artifacts and people (Dreyfus, 2002). We assume that creativity is a skillful experience of kinesthetic 'knowledge' (Penny, 2022). In teacher training, these ideas for cultivating creativity are overshadowed by conventional static methodologies and cognitive notions that reduce creativity to final products and internal mental processes (Guilford 1967; Torrance 1972; Sternberg & Grigorenko 2001; Gardner 1994; Kaufman & Beghetto 2009). Although these notions have contributed to understanding the phenomenon of creativity, in this article we relate to collective, distributed, and embodied notions of creativity that escape individual and cognitive bias (Glăveanu 2014; Ihde & Malafouris 2019; Malinin 2019). Our approach is in tune with Vygotsky's ideas about perceptual ontogenesis, in which perception is reconfigured from naive to cultural forms within dedicated cultural settings designed for exploratory activity (Vygotsky, 1926/2001). Considering the above, we present some didactic experiences through ethnographic participant observation, we observe students of pedagogies engaging in creative activities suggested by our theoretical approach. We use these observations to illustrate how Project-Based Learning and Design Thinking allow us to understand creativity from the point of view of experiential becoming, as argued by Tim Ingold (2014). That is, rethinking the creativity inherent in practice and paying attention to the development of contingent relationships, which emerge learning by doing from designing and prototyping with technologies. References Dreyfus, H.L. (2002). Intelligence without representation - Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation. The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 367-383. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021351606209 Frey, C., & Osborne, M. (2013). The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization? University of Oxford. Gardner H. (1994) The creators' patterns. In: Boden M. (ed.) Dimensions of creativity. MIT Press/Badford Books, London: 143-158. Glăveanu V. (2014) Distributed creativity: What is it? In: Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual. Springer, Berlin: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05434-6_1 Guilford J. P. (1967) The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill, New York. Hutchins E. (1995) Cognition in the wild. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1881.001.0001 Ihde D. & Malafouris L. (2019) Homo faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and material engagement theory. Philosophy & Technology 32(2): 195-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0321-7 Ingold T. (2014) The creativity of undergoing. Pragmatics & Cognition 22: 124-139. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22.1.07ing Kalaydjian J., Laroche, J. Noy, L. and Bachrach, A. (2022) A distributed model of collective creativity in free play. Front. Educ. 7:902251. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.902251 Kaufman J. C. & Beghetto R. A. (2009) Beyond big and little: The Four C Model of creativity. Review of General Psychology 13: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013688 Malinin L. (2019) How radical is embodied creativity? Implications of 4E approaches for creativity research and teaching. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 2372. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02372 OECD. (2018). The future of education and skills: Education 2030. Paris: OECD. Penny, S. (2022). Sensorimotor debilities in digital cultures. AI & Soc 37, 355-366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01186-0 Reimers F. M. & Chung C. K. (2019) Teaching and learning for the twenty-first century: Educational goals, policies, and curricula from six nations. Harvard Education Press. Sternberg R. J. & Grigorenko E. L. (2001) Guilford's structure of intellect model and model of creativity: Contributions and limitations. Creativity Research Journal 13(3-4): 309-316. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326934CRJ1334_08 Torrance P. (1972) Predictive validity of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The Journal of Creative Behavior 6(4): 236-252. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1972.tb00936.x Varela F. J., Thompson E. & Rosch E. (1991) The embodied mind. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6730.001.0001 Videla, R., Veloz, T. and Pino, C. (in press). 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