Session Information
29 SES 08, Parallel Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper presents the initial research questions and pedagogical aims that serve as the foundation for the author's doctoral dissertation. The research is developed in an integrated school (students from 3 to 18 years) in Barcelona, which has developed an innovative learning environment. This an intra-curricular space that, based on trans-disciplinary and artistic practices and multi-grade learners, is a complement to the formal curriculum that remains stuck in the fragmentation of learning subjects. Within this framework for an innovative learning environment, the author developed and is now implementing an ongoing workshopthat 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 development (Vygotsky, 1996).
The project (ongoing each year) involves students (6 to 12 years old) 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 participated in the workshop. Their participation lasted six weeks, at which point another three groups became incorporated into the project. The total number of participants during the 2011-12 academic year was 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, new 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. 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 liquid pedagogies (Bauman, 2005), invisible learning (Cobo & Morevec, 2011), and innovative learning environments (Istance, 2009).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Arnheim, R. (1993). Consideraciones sobre la educación artística. Barcelona: Paidós. Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid life. Cambridge: Polity press. Cobo, C. i Moravec, J. W. (2011). Aprendizaje invisible. Hacia una nueva ecología de la educación. Barcelona: Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius (UB - eBook) Freire, P. (1972). Cultural action for freedom. Penguin education: Harmondsworth. Gardner, H. (2003). La inteligencia reformulada. Las inteligencias múltiples en el siglo XXI. Barcelona: Paidós. Istance, D. (2009). Education Today. The OECD Perspective. OECD Publishing. Vygotsky, L. S. (1996). El desarrollo de los procesos psicológicos superiores. Barcelona: Crítica.
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