Response to “How Multimodality Works in Mathematical Activity”

The main goal of Ferrara’s article titled “How Multimodality Works in Mathematical Activity” is to “further elaborate on the ways multimodal aspects are exploited by learners thinking about mathematics by considering as relevant, not the fact that multimodality manifests itself, but how it happens”.  She tries to do this by looking at how one child learns to graph motion through his perceptual, bodily and imaginary experiences.  The setting of the study was at a primary school in the northwest part of Italy.  The study worked with the same students from grade 2 to grade 5 by having them interact with two different tools to interpret graphs related to given movements and to check movements associated to given graphs.

The way in which one student, Benny, described a graph was a main focus of this study.  He was asked to walk out a certain path using a specific graphing tool, which then created a graph of his movements in a position-time graph.  He had a recollection of moments of his own motions, then imagination of qualities of motion in relation to qualities on the graph, and then he could interpret its shape.  This shows how he was able to enter into a temporary possible world so that he could pretend something was happening in order to explain and understand something else.  Also, at a different point in the study, he was able to communicate this process to the teacher and his peers, which is in the social context of knowledge construction. 

When I was first reading this article, I really struggled with the meaning of multimodality.  I understood after reading the example about Benny that it means using imagination and physical action to conceptualize mathematical concepts.  I think teachers try to create this environment for students by primarily using manipulatives.  In this article, the manipulative was the graphing tool.  By experiencing the movements physically and seeing how the movements created the graph, Benny was able to understand position-time graphs.

I like how this article used graphing technology for younger students because I would have thought to use such a technology more in the high school years.  This has made me reconsider how valuable a technology or manipulative is for any age.  Also, in the article they used a lot of story telling to describe scenarios.  For example, they used Mister x and Mister z who were two secret agents who worked in Movilandia, but were invisible there.  However, Mister x and Mister z could communicate with the students through Cartesiolandia, which is a special language that describes the movements performed.  I love how Cartesiolandia sounds like the “Cartesian” for Cartesian plane where we use coordinate points to describe positions on the graph.  Here the teachers are basically doing the same thing, but are making it more accessible and fun for the students to engage with.  I had a precalculus teacher who did a similar thing to describe concepts in trigonometry.  Even though I don’t remember the specific stories today, I remember loving math because my teacher made is accessible for me to engage with by making it fun.