Module 5: Embodied Thinking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We take body motion for granted sometimes by not realizing how complicated seemingly simple tasks actually are.  This morning, my wife and I attempted to feed our five month old daughter papaya for the first time.  The simple act of eating food with a spoon was made to look extremely complicated by my daughter.  We had to encourage her to open her mouth, to keep the food in her mouth, to swallow rather than let the food sit in her mouth or to spit it out.  Eating is such a seemingly simple act of motion, yet it requires many small muscle movements working together to accomplish.  Using “embodied thinking” as a cognitive tool requires us to focus on all those little movements yet again in order to form a new way of moving.  This process promotes deeper thinking about a topic as we attempt to move in a way that embodies a theme.

 

In trying to come up with a way to incorporate embodied thinking with graphing, I wanted to bring the motions of graphing to a larger part of my body rather than just my using brain and fingers drawing a graph, which is the traditional method of graphing.  I chose to focus specifically on graphing systems of linear inequalities.  This type of graphing requires us to shade in solution regions for the inequalities and any areas that are overlapping between the shaded regions is the region of solutions for both inequalities.  Wanting to emphasize this idea of the shaded regions being the solutions I decided to use finger painting for the shading in order to incorporate more movements into the process of the graphing.  I wanted to feel the shaded region under my fingers, feel the paints mixing in my fingers to create a new color (i.e. blue and yellow paint together made green paint).

 

As I was completing this exercise, I not only created the graphs, but I actually became a part of it.  I felt the shaded regions mixing together to produce their solutions.  Not only can I remember this topic through mental memory but also I am incorporating my muscle memories as well to help me remember this topic.  Graphing, specifically, and math, in general, are usually considered very academic and meant to be worked on with computers or paper and pencil, however this doesn’t always need to be the case.  Utilizing embodied thinking A) combines the academic with the kinesthetic, which creates a non-routine and interesting activity and B) taps into other types of memories of our body rather than just that of the brain.  Memory is an attribute of our muscles and motions and we can use this to create a more robust understanding of and a deeper connection with topics.