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Aesthetics as a liberating force in mathematics education?

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Abstract

This article investigates different meanings associated with contemporary scholarship on the aesthetic dimension of inquiry and experience, and uses them to suggest possibilities for challenging widely held beliefs about the elitist and/or frivolous nature of aesthetic concerns in mathematics education. By relating aesthetics to emerging areas of interest in mathematics education such as affect, embodiment and enculturation, as well as to issues of power and discourse, this article argues for aesthetic awareness as a liberating, and also connective force in mathematics education.

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Notes

  1. Higginson (2006) documents some of this in relation to mathematics. Additionally, several books can now be found on the aesthetics of science It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science (Farmelo, 2002), Beauty and the Beast: The Aesthetic Moment in Science (Fischer, 1999) and of computing, Aesthetic Computing Fishwick (2006).

  2. Langer (1957) emphasizes this fact by describing how the merest sense-experience is a process of formulation; human beings have a tendency to organise the sensory field into groups and patterns of sense-data, to perceive forms rather than a flux of light-impressions. They promptly and unconsciously “abstract a form from each sensory experience, and use this form to conceive the experience as a whole, as a thing” p. 90. For Langer, this unconscious appreciation of forms is the primitive root of all abstraction, which in turn is the keynote of rationality; so it appears that the conditions for rationality lie deep in pure animal experience—in the human power of perceiving, in the elementary functions of eyes and ears and fingers.

  3. The physicist Freeman Dyson (1982) also distinguishes between two types of scientists, namely, the ‘unifiers’ and the ‘diversifiers,’ the former finding and cherishing symmetries, the latter enjoying the breaking of them.

  4. In this book, Lakoff and Núñez offer a very stimulating perspective on the genesis of mathematical ideas, based on their theories of embodied cognition. While many scholars (including cognitive science, mathematicians and educators) have expressed reservations about their specific claims (see, for example, Schiralli and Sinclair, 2002), variations of the ideas expressed in this book have motivated many studies in mathematics education that are relevant to an embodied perspective on aesthetics.

  5. It might be argued that journal editors play the role of the art critic in mathematics, but their work is done within a small community of mathematicians, rather than being available or addressed to those outside that community. Textbook authors also play a role similar to that of the art critic, in that they seek to organize, explain and even interpret mathematical products for an outside audience; however, they rarely actually criticize or question these products.

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  1. Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Nathalie Sinclair

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Sinclair, N. Aesthetics as a liberating force in mathematics education?. ZDM Mathematics Education 41, 45–60 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-008-0132-x

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