Inspiring visit by Nathalie Sinclair, previous Svend Pedersen Lecture Awardee
For a few days in March, Professor Nathalie Sinclair visited colleagues in the mathematics education section. She was here to talk about her ground-breaking research in mathematics education, and to continue developing already established collaborations with the department.
That mathematics sits in your fingertips is a provocative statement. Still, it is one of the ideas that Professor Nathalie Sinclair investigates in her research in mathematics education. Professor at the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and former Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning, her research explores mathematics sense-making as embodied, aesthetic activity. For children and youth at school, the work with haptic and dynamic geometric systems generates affordances to experience mathematics at the “fingertips”. She received the Svend Pedersen Lecture Award in 2019 in recognition for her groundbreaking work, of significance to the advance of mathematics education in our current, highly digitalized environments.
During her visit in 2024, she worked with researchers and teachers at the Department of Teaching and Learning to explore together recent research developments. She gave a seminar on the topic of time and (mathematics) education, based on her recent book with Petra Mikulan, “Time and Education. Time Pedagogy Against Oppression” (2023, Bloomsbury Academic). She also discussed and provided feedback to the current research projects of doctoral students in the VR funded Graduate Schools RelMaS and ReMath.
She also presented her research developing the app “The Griddler” (designed by Nicholas Jackiw, still in beta version), a tool to grid the world. The design of the app and of pedagogical situations for its use combines a double intention. On the one hand, it promotes working more proportionally/relationally instead of arithmetically, as usually promoted in conventional school mathematics. At the same time, the app also allows understanding the formatting power of grids as mathematical/geometrical structures that have been used to flatten the world in consequential ways for different communities through history.
Last, but not least, she advanced her collaboration with Paola Valero regarding the 27th ICMI international study “Mathematics education and the socio-ecological”, of which they both are members. This is an international collaborative research effort to survey existing research and advance new directions for a mathematics education that educates children to deal with the ecological, social and political sustainability issues now and in the future. Professor Sinclair’s stay at Stockholm University has definitely been a source of inspiration for our current work and a boost for further collaboration.
After Stockholm, she continued to Örebro University, where she was a plenary speaker in both the Mathematics Biennial Conference and the Swedish Mathematics Education Research conference.
Last updated: March 25, 2024
Source: Department of Teaching and Learning