Assembling a Torus: Family Mobilities in an Immersive Mathematics Exhibition

Abstract

In this article, we report on a video-based field study of an intergenerational family’s enactment of a mathematical object (a torus) in the context of an immersive mathematics exhibition in a science center. To do this, we center interwoven, multi-party mobilities at multiple scales–walking, gesturing, touching, and postural adjustments – as key aspects of how family members co-assemble a local, multi-layered set of meanings for a mathematical object. Drawing on and blending approaches from science and technology studies and interaction analysis we investiage how immersive museum exhibitions can enable particular patterns of visitor mobility and provisionally reconfigure relations among walking, sensing, and knowing. In contrast to what we describe as a sedentarist bias in studies of learning and cognition in museums, we argue that walking and other movements across a wide range of scales are constitutive of visitors’ interpretive accomplishments, rather than mere backdrop to them.

Acknowledgments

We thank Nicole Ferry, the Fleet Science Center, the InforMath team, and our research participants for their contributions to this work. We also thank New York University’s Interaction Analysis and Learning group. Finally, we are also grateful to Sarah Radke, Colin Hennessy Elliott, and Daniela Della Volpe for their close reading of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

1 While we have retained the terminology of “transcript” here, we believe a theoretical turn toward embodied mobilities warrants a longer discussion about the language we use to describe emerging representational methodologies. An alternative descriptor might be “choreography” as this draws more explicit attention to collective movement and is perhaps less freighted with the history of verbal bias characterizing transcription in educational research. We have chosen to retain the term “transcript” in this article for the sake of brevity and due to the term’s familiarity in the field.

2 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Informal Mathematics Collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation through grant DRL-1323587.