Contact:
- [office] Tolman 4538
- [secret office] Evans 559
- [email] trninic (at) berkeley (dot) edu
About Me: I am a second year doctoral student with the SESAME (Science and Mathematics Education) interdisciplinary group at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Croatia, I've lived in the United States since 1995. My background is in mathematics, in particular set theory and algebra. My background prior to that is in philosophy, in particular whatever philosophy I happen to find agreeable.
What else? My favorite Olympic sport is biathlon.
Research Interests: In general, my interests lie at the unruly intersection of cognition, learning, and mathematics. I am interested, most broadly, in (1) how people learn mathematics and (2) how people think mathematically. In particular (all academics are required to state "in particular" when describing what is it they do) - in particular, my studies focus on intuition, where school instruction should be viewed as an attempt to coordinate students' individual means of sense-making (via intuition) with normative sense-making of various disciplines (e.g., mathematics). I am largely inspired by work of Donald Schon and Efraim Fischbein.
Projects:
- PDMPS: Paradigmatic Didactical Mathematical Problematic Situations
- Fractal Village
- Martial Pedagogy: I conducted interviews with various martial artists in an attempt to understand approaches to teaching in Soo Bahk Do, Tai Chi, and Capoeira. I hope to unravel meaningful parallels between teachings of concepts in martial arts and those found in traditional mathematics instruction, with an eye to mathematics as an embodied activity.