This paper develops research questions and develops the pedagogical aims that serve as the foundation for the author's doctoral dissertation. The research is implemented in an integrated school (students from 3 to 18 years) in Barcelona, which has created an innovative learning environment. This is an intra-curricular space that, based on trans-disciplinary artistic practices and multi-grade learners (6 to 12 years old), becomes a complement to the formal curriculum that remains still stuck in a fragmentation of learning subjects (Crahay, 2006). Within this framework for an innovative learning environment, the author developed and is now implementing an ongoing workshop that focuses on mathematical concepts, by using the notion of volume as a basis for experimentation and contextualization. This activity seeks to localize new ways for introducing drawing, and other exercises involving space and volume, in learning situations that precede student's development (Vygotsky, 1996).
The project (ongoing each year) involves students working in a collaborative space, throughout the entire academic year. Every day, three multi-aged groups (6-8; 9-10; 11-12) comprising 18 students each participate in the workshop. Their participation lasts six weeks, at which point another three groups are incorporated into the project. The total number of participants during every academic year is over 300 primary school students.
Through the design and implementation of this project, the research asks: how can we intervene in an innovative educational context to improve students' intelligences (Gardner, 2003), skills and diverse abilities (spatial, logical, abstract, and mathematic), in order to generate deep understanding and construct, collaboratively, alternative epistemologies of space and thought?
To address this question, the workshop is developed as a transversal teaching-learning framework where, for example, drawing and applied arts acquire a more valued role in education (Arnheim, 1993) and where mathematics are explained, through experiments and practice, in a contextualized manner (Pineda & Callís, 2014). Geometry and volume, as the activity content, play a key role in this study of relationships. Through the implementation of the workshop, the project aims to: 1) foster a critical awareness of spaces, and how they affect us, how we perceive them, and how we live in them, in terms of an emancipatory educational process (Freire, 1972) and, 2) activate a continuous inquiry into invisible learning (Cobo & Moravec, 2011) and innovative learning environments (Istance, 2009), for 3) to explore and contribute to understanding ways in which art practice can be used as a tool for promoting trans-disciplinary learning.
By understanding the process of children‘s acquiring, understanding and expressing modes to visualize reality, the author is trying to articulate new alternative pedagogies and exercises, including explaining drawing methods near perspective laws and technical design for helping 6-8 year old children to develop the volume concept.