Stop 1: “Number as mathematicians are neutral, they have no meaning. Inside my brain, numbers have massive significance, and I’m massively superstitious about it (29 min 33s).”
This moment was a stop for me because it opened my mind to a different way of seeing/living numbers. I like art, but very differently than Nick Sayers. I enjoy art once in a while, but I am not craving art. I do not have the talent/creation creativity to do what he does, and I am more the type of person to see numbers as neutral. But by hearing him explain how he sees and lives numbers helped me understand how some of my students might feel toward numbers. Now, I think it would be a waste of talent and opportunity to not let those students use their strengths and develop them. I understand better the necessity of having a balance between learning traditional math and learning math through other disciplines like the arts. To make a connection with the article I read this week, this is a good example of why we need to start implementing more activities that transverse the traditional boundaries associated with mathematics. By opening this door to students, we might discover talents and different perspectives on certain topics.
Stop 2: “It was an interesting sort of thinking of places where here would be enough big movements over the year […] and it was a complete guessing game of what would work and what wouldn’t (1h 44min)”
This moment inspired me to create the same type of project with my students. I think this is interesting because having to think about the environment and the living things to create art and investigate science and mathematics is a great way to embrace the First Peoples’ learning principle: “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place)( First Nations Education Steering Committee, n.d.).” By having the students explore the land and learning from it, trying to figure out how different places offer different types of pictures and by having them produce art from their land is a holistic experience able to connect them with the land.
Stop 3: “I realized that when I took my camera low down, it looked like a sort of ancient, sort of a ruined city of castles like a ruined empire, like an empire of dust (1h 49min).”
This made me stop for two reasons. First, it is interesting that the different scale (lowering the camera) offered a different view on the artwork. It confirms that working with different scales can offer different perspectives and allow learners to develop new ideas (Chronaki et al., 2025). Also, it shows that creating artwork is a process where you try an idea, create some of it, verify your work, create a little more, verify again, look at it under a different perspective, and then decide if the artwork is good or not. This process is very similar to guess and check we use in mathematics! Now, I can see how creating mathematical artworks could help students become more risk takers in mathematics tasks.
Secondly, I thought this was a good example of how mathematics can be used to represent data. This is a good example of what D’Ignazio & Klein (2020) call data visceralization; a data representation that the body can experience both emotionally and physically.
What does this artist's work offer you in terms of understanding math-art connections, and what does it offer you as a math or science teacher?
Other than what I discussed in my stops, this artist’s work made me see with concrete examples how arts can open up different perspectives, offer new engaging learning activities, can offer different scales to work with certain mathematics concepts, and can help us re-think our relationships with the Earth and the living things.
Questions:
When you presented/created your projects with learners, what were their reactions? Did they enjoy it? Were they aware they were doing math/science?
Did you ever have to convince someone that your work was mathematical? If so, what did you tell them?
References
Chronaki, A., Gerofsky, S., Nemirovsky, R., Ryan, U., Lazaridour, E., Letsiou, M., Torretta, N. B. & Hillgren, P. (2025). Circular movements of healing with maths, arts and craft: Reimagining disciplinary transversals for learning. In Proceedings of MACAS 2025, University of Moncton, NB.
D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Libraries Experimental Collections Fund. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11805.001.0001
First Nations Education Steering Committee. (n.d.) First Peoples Principals of Learning [poster]. Retrived from https://www.fnesc.ca/first-peoples-principles-of-learning/
Your second stop was also an inspiring moment for me when I watched the interview. I appreciate how you have connected it to the FNESC principles and land-based learning. It would also be interesting to do a project like this with another class in a different part of the province or country over the same time period and compare the pictures at the end.
ReplyDeleteNoemi, I can totally relate because I’ve experienced something similar in my own classroom. I find that blending visual arts with math comes fairly naturally to students, but asking them to express mathematical ideas through movement or more embodied forms of art often feels much harder, for them and for me. Your point about discipline boundaries really resonates; after years of being told that subjects live in separate boxes, it makes sense that students might hesitate or feel unsure about how to merge them. I wonder if part of our work is slowly helping them unlearn those rigid separations so they feel freer to explore mathematical ideas creatively. I imagine the level of comfort and willingness to take risks can vary so much depending on age and prior school experiences.
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