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This qualitative study explores the potential for metaphor, movement, gesture, and vocalization in helping learners notice mathematically important features of graphs, and in making mathematics more accessible for learners with visual impairment. Two elementary school students with visual impairment were introduced to several multimodal activities related to the graphs of mathematical functions, using a pre-/post-assessment methodology. Video recordings of the session were coded for qualitative changes in engagement with graphs through multimodal representations. After the activity intervention, both students showed improvements in their ability to voice, gesture, and describe details of mathematical graphs with accuracy and understanding. The findings demonstrate the potential of multimodal methods for teaching mathematics and enhancing other skill areas through movement, metaphor, voice, and gesture. The findings suggest that full-bodied experience with graphs can provide foundational support for learners with visual impairment to work with print or tactile graphics. We propose that purposeful selection of materials and collaboration between teachers of students with visual impairment, mathematics educators, and teachers of dance and physical education can enhance the design and implementation of effective lessons using multimodal means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the ancestral genres of mathematical graphs. It explores the inevitable entanglement of body, culture, and emotion of which Cartesian graphs are freighted including gestures, spatial cognition, and straightness and squareness, which relates to the positioning, orthogonal axes of positive and negative numbers, and truthfulness of graphs, respectively. It adds that association of the entanglements as genre in graphing may help learning the human context of mathematics.

This paper reports on a research project in mathematics education involving the use of gesture, movement and vocal sound to highlight mathematically salient features of the graphs of polynomial functions. Empirical observations of students’ spontaneous gesture types when enacting elicited gestures of these graphs reveal a number of useful binaries (proximal/distal, being the graph/seeing the graph, within sight/within reach). These binaries inform an analysis of videotaped gestural and interview data and appear to predict teachers’ assessments of student mathematical engagement and understanding with great accuracy. Reframing this data in terms of C-VPT and O-VPT adds a further layer of sophistication to the analysis and connects it with deeper findings in cognitive and neuroscience and gesture studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]