Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du doctorat en informatique cognitive, en collaboration avec le centre de recherche CRIA et l'ISC

Dor ABRAHAMSON

Jeudi le 26 octobre 2023 à 10h30

PK-5115 (aussi possible d'y assister à distance, pour ce faire, vous devez vous inscrire ici)    

Titre : Enactivist Symbol Grounding: From Attentional Anchors to Mathematical Discourse

Résumé

Embodiment is a recent paradigm in the philosophy of cognitive science. It questions beliefs driving 20th century research on the human mind, which assumed that knowledge is representations in the brain. Embodiment is an alternative hypothesis. It is not a ‘thing’ but the individual’s capacity for particular perceptuomotor enactment, situated in the world as much as in the body: Knowledge is a way of engaging the environment in anticipation of accomplishing interactions. What does this mean for educational practice? What is the embodiment or enactment of abstract ideas, like justice, photosynthesis, or algebra? What is the teacher’s role in embodied designs for learning? I will describe my lab’s educational design-based collaborative research on mathematical learning, and how we came to conceptualize perception as a key psychological construct in the analysis and promotion of content learning. I will present findings of emergent attentional structures that students generate spontaneously as perceptual solutions to motor-control problems. These projected Gestalts then become verbal through adopting symbolic artifacts provided by the teacher. I will show how an embodiment perspective hels develop instructional resource for students with diverse sensorimotor capacities

Biographie

Dor ABRAHAMSON received his Masters in Cognitive Psychology from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and his PhD in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. Since 2005, he has served as a member of faculty in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Berkeley, where he established the Embodied Design Research Laboratory. Professor Abrahamson is a design-based researcher who invents pedagogical technologies for teaching and learning mathematics. He analyzes data gathered in the course of evaluating these products to develop theoretical models of cognitive and social process that lead to insight and fluency. Abrahamson is particularly interested in relations between learning to move in new ways and learning mathematics concepts. His research, which draws on embodied cognition, dynamic systems theory, and sociocultural theory, has been funded by federal agencies and private foundations.

References  

Abrahamson, D., & Sánchez-García, R. (2016). Learning is moving in new ways: The ecological dynamics of mathematics education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(2), 203-239. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016.1143370

Abrahamson, D. (2019). A new world: Educational research on the sensorimotor roots of mathematical reasoning. In A. Shvarts (Ed.), Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Russian chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) & Yandex (pp. 48–68). Yandex. https://edrl.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Abrahamson.2019.PMEYandex.pdf 

Abrahamson, D. (2020). Strawberry feel forever: Understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics. The Senses and Society, 15(2), 216–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1764742 

Abrahamson, D. (2021). Grasp actually: An evolutionist argument for enactivist mathematics education. Human Development, 65(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1159/000515680

Shvarts, A., & Abrahamson, D. (2023). Coordination dynamics of semiotic mediation: A functional dynamic systems perspective on mathematics teaching/learning. In T. Veloz, R. Videla, & A. Riegler (Eds.), Education in the 21st century [Special issue]. Constructivist Foundations, 18(2), 220–234. https://constructivist.info/18/2