Embodied design: constructing means for constructing meaning

Abstract

Design-based research studies are conducted as iterative implementationanalysis-modification cycles, in which emerging theoretical models and pedagogically plausible activities are reciprocally tuned toward each other as a means of investigating conjectures pertaining to mechanisms underlying content teaching and learning. Yet this approach, even when resulting in empirically effective educational products, remains underconceptualized as long as researchers cannot be explicit about their craft and specifically how data analyses inform design decisions. Consequentially, design decisions may appear arbitrary, design methodology is insufficiently documented for broad dissemination, and design practice is inadequately conversant with learning-sciences perspectives. One reason for this apparent under-theorizing, I propose, is that designers do not have appropriate constructs to formulate and reflect on their own intuitive responses to students' observed interactions with the media under development. Recent socio-cultural explication of epistemic artifacts as semiotic means for mathematical learners to objectify presymbolic notions (e.g., Radford, Mathematical Thinking and Learning 5(1): 37-70, 2003) may offer design-based researchers intellectual perspectives and analytic tools for theorizing design improvements as responses to participants' compromised attempts to build and communicate meaning with available media. By explaining these media as potential semiotic means for students to objectify their emerging understandings of mathematical ideas, designers, reciprocally, create semiotic means to objectify their own intuitive design decisions, as they build and improve these media. Examining three case studies of undergraduate students reasoning about a simple probability situation (binomial), I demonstrate how the semiotic approach illuminates the process and content of student reasoning and, so doing, explicates and possibly enhances design-based research methodology.

Embodiment and Embodied Design

“…The phrase "embodied design" was first coined by Thomas van Rompay, then a cognitive-psychologist-turned-industrial-designer, who used Conceptual Metaphor Theory to tune the emotional experience evoked by public structures, such as bus-stop shelters (Van Rompay, Hekkert, & Muller, 2005). Abrahamson (2009) imported the phrase into the learning sciences to describe the craft of engineering pedagogical artifacts and activities attuned to how humans naturally perceive the world, yet conducive to disciplinary reanalysis and signification. In an environment based on embodied design principles, learners could approach a problem in chemistry, biology, physics, material science, or mathematics using their natural bodily instincts and movements.…”

Encrypted objects and decryption processes: problem-solving with functions in a learning environment based on cryptography

“…Doing so provides an opportunity to consider the reciprocal relations between the design, as enactment of a problem-solving environment based on an analogy between the mathematical concept of function and the context of cryptanalysis, and theoretical perspectives that seek to resolve the duality of function conceptions as process and object (for a related example, see Abrahamson, 2009). In particular, the instructional value of a design for cryptography as analogy to function hinges on the extent to which that analogy sustains learner engagement with the full scope of the function concept-as process, as object, as integrated symbolic procept.…”

Rethinking Probability Education: Perceptual Judgment as Epistemic Resource

“…Educators can thus play vital roles in students' conceptual development by strategically placing pedagogically desirable cultural forms in the learning environment and steering students to re-articulate their naïve views by these particular semiotic means (Abrahamson, 2009a;Mariotti, 2009;Sfard, 2002Sfard, , 2007. Students may appropriate cultural forms also as means of accomplishing enactive goals, and not just discursive goals, and in so doing they may bootstrap new operatory schemas by reconfiguring their naïve strategies (Abrahamson, Trninic, Gutiérrez, Huth, & Lee, 2011).…”

“…This difference between immediate and mediated notions may confer upon perceptual judgment a unique advantage over experiments in relation to selecting introductory grounding activities for probability designs. Elsewhere, we have demonstrated the extensibility of these introductory activities toward incorporating symbolic displays as well as cases of heteroprobable outcomes (Abrahamson, 2009a).…”

“…The project grew into a three-pronged effort to develop products, theory, and frameworks (see Abrahamson & Wilensky, 2007, p. 25). Embarking from prior findings (Abrahamson & Wilensky, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, I: (a) built mixed-media materials and activities for learning fundamental probability notions (Abrahamson, 2006b) and evaluated their pedagogical affordances (Abrahamson, 2007;Abrahamson & Cendak, 2006); (b) developed explanatory models for the roles of perceptual reasoning in conceptual learning (Abrahamson, 2009b(Abrahamson, , 2010(Abrahamson, , 2011(Abrahamson, , 2012bAbrahamson, Gutiérrez, & Baddorf, 2012); and (c) created a grounded mathematics design framework (Abrahamson, 2009a) and contributed to reflective discourse on design-based research practice (Abrahamson, 2009c(Abrahamson, , 2012a.…”