Embodied Professional Development

Rationale

Empirical research is increasingly demonstrating pedagogical contributions of an embodied cognition approach to the design of mathematics learning environment (Abrahamson et al., 2023). Recognizing the critical role of teachers in facilitating embodied learning processes, we look to center efforts on preparing teachers for this less familiar approach to mathematics instruction. The objective is to sensitize teachers to multimodal actions and utterances students manifest as they solve interaction problems designed to foster conceptual learning and disciplinary discourse. Such a new approach, we propose, can be fostered by engaging the teachers themselves in collaborative problem-solving and sense-making activities during professional development (PD) interventions centered on creating and facilitating embodied design. Although conversations have begun with mathematics teachers around the embodied paradigm, to date there has been little systematic research effort to investigate the potential of PD to promote the embodied approach through to classroom practice.

The set-up

We operationalize our empirical agenda in the form of a PD workshop facilitating collaborative action and reflection. The PD focuses on geometry content, where the central activity, the Embodied Icosahedron, involves teacher groups in collaborative learning-by-building of a body-scale geometrical structure, an activity developed within the embodied design research framework (Abrahamson, 2014). Whereas the activity itself has been explored by EDRL and collaborators since 2016, both with researchers (e.g., Abrahamson & Rosenbaum, 2016, at PME-NA) and students (e.g., Palatnik & Abrahamson, 2022), its PD applications are a later focus (see Rosenbaum et al., 2024, for the project’s earlier history).

Teacher collaboration

As facilitators of teachers’ PD, we build on the characteristics of professional communities (Lomos et al., 2011, Lomos, 2012), including a sense of professional identity and peer support, to promote a shift toward initiating, encouraging, and valorizing multimodal mathematical discourse in classroom practice. Through this project and specific activity we seek to lay the groundwork for teachers to create communities of practice around the promotion of embodied pedagogy.

Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) and Immersive Virtual Reality

Our research methods include multi-modal data collection and learning analytics to capture and interpret teacher engagement, collaborative gestures, eye-gaze paths (Palatnik, Abrahamson, & Lomos, 2025), physiological responses, and verbal and gestural communication (Abrahamson et al., 2021).

Building on insights from the concrete implementation of the PD and classroom practice, we are currently ideating and engineering a counterpart Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) Professional Development (PD) (IVR-PD) environment that can scale up our dissemination efforts to a stand-alone embodied-design activity. Enhanced by Gen-AI, teachers participating in IVR-PD access in real time their immersed students’ individual or collective multi-modal behaviors embedded in the virtual objects they are manipulating, and receive conceptually relevant input and feedback. We thus incorporate multimodality into IVR, including gestures and haptic–tactile sensations, which play an essential cognitive role in mathematics learning but have largely been excluded from digital environments (Dimmel et al., in preparation).

Activities

An auspicious opportunity for piloting our first activity emerged during an international workshop we ran on multimodal learning analytics (EDaMMLA 2024), where a team built a large icosahedron from long wood dowels and silicon-pipe joiners, with no instructions for construction.

Observation of their rapid construction process suggests that they were generally “on the same page” and, therefore, perhaps all entertained the same geometrical ideas. However, deeper analysis of their multimodal behaviors and utterances, both during the activity and in post-intervention stimulated-recall individual interviews, suggests acute divergence in perceptual Gestalts, even when two or more participants referred in speech and gesture ostensibly to the precise same material element, voicing operational consensus. As such, our findings query cognitive–anthropological theory of organized social activity, e.g., Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action, by producing empirical evidence of productive joint action on indexically co-referenced and co-attended features of the environment yet in the absence of perceptual or conceptual cohesion (Abrahamson, Lomos, & Palatnik, 2025).

Together with our RITMO collaborators, we are also looking at the rich multimodal data, supplemented by eye-tracking and physiological indicators of behavior, such as heart rate and breathing patterns of the four participants, to see what other insights about collaboration emerge during such groupworthy tasks (Palatnik, Abrahamson, & Lomos, under review).

Project team

Catalina Lomos; Dor Abrahamson; Alik Palatnik

References:

Abrahamson, D. (2014). Building educational activities for understanding: An elaboration on the embodied-design framework and its epistemic grounds. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 2(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2014.07.002

Abrahamson, D., & Rosenbaum, L. F. (2016, Nov.). Embodied icosahedron. Participatory activity designed for the Embodied Mathematics, Imagination, and Cognition Working Group (EMIC) at the 38th annual meeting of the North-American chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA), Tucson, AZ, November 3–6

Abrahamson, D., Tancredi, S., Chen, R. S. Y., Flood, V. J., & Dutton, E. (2023). Embodied design of digital resources for mathematics education: Theory, methodology, and framework of a pedagogical research program. In B. Pepin, G. Gueude, & J. Choppin (Eds.), Handbook of digital resources in mathematics education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95060-6_8-1

Abrahamson, D., Lomos, C., & Palatnik, A. (2025). The icosahedron in the room: Revisiting pedagogical dilemmas of individual learning in collaborative activities. Contribution for O. Swidan (Leader), TWG 16: Learning Mathematics With Technology and Other Resources. In M. Bosch & S. Carreira (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th annual Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME14). ERME.

Palatnik, A., & Abrahamson, D. (2022). Escape from Plato’s cave: An enactivist argument for learning 3D geometry by constructing tangible models. In G. Bolondi, F. Ferretti, & C. Spagnolo (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME12, February 6–10, 2022). ERME.

Rosenbaum, L. F., Palatnik, A., Reimer, P., & Abrahamson, D. (2024). Building mathematical spaces through multi-faceted, body-scale geometry. Educational Designer (16). https://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume4/issue16/article66/

Palatnik, A., Abrahamson, D., & Lomos, C. (2025). I see what you’re thinking: Embodied collaborative argumentation. Contribution for A. Palatnik (Leader), TWG 04: Geometry Teaching and Learning. In M. Bosch & S. Carreira (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th annual Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME14). ERME.

Palatnik, A., Abrahamson, D., & Lomos, C. (under review; accepted abstract). In their hands: Multimodal learning-analytics as reflective-practice resources empowering mathematics teachers’ professional development. In B. Schneider, R. Martinez-Maldonado, G. Biswas, & M. Worsley (Eds.), Implementing multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) in ecological settings for generating actionable insights <Special issue>, Learning and Instruction.

Grants:

The project was initiated during Catalina Lomos’s scientific visit to the EDRL supported by the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program & FNR Fulbright Awards Programme 2023 – 2024.

The Luxembourg National Research Fund – 2024 INTER Mobility Call to support future research in Luxembourg in 2025.