CREATE for STEM Presentation – “Making Sense…With a Few Senses…Makes no Sense”

“Making Sense…With a Few Senses…Makes no Sense”

Mathematics textbooks, school exams, and the daily mathematical activity in most mathematics classrooms privilege the writing of symbols and mathematical notation: We want to SEE what students write. Class participation privileges questions, answers, and verbal explanations: We want to HEAR what students think. Seeing and hearing are the senses that cognitive imperialism has chosen to rule the teaching practice and research methodologies. Much of the jobs of teachers and researchers, then, consists of the tiring search for evidence; that is, what is obvious to the eye or mind. However, how would the teaching of mathematics and its research feel if we included all the senses? What ways of teaching, learning and research have we excluded by excluding the other senses? In this conversation, Higinio will share theories, methodologies, and analytic approaches that embrace and celebrate the relevance of all our senses in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Through a selection of theoretical examples from his teaching-research projects in the US, México, and Chile (i.e., Fulbright US Scholar, NSF ERC CORE Fundamental Research), Higinio will exemplify how he has invited the senses into his mathematics education research, not so much to confirm knowledge ac(re)quired, but to touch, hear, smell, taste, and see¾ that is, sense¾ the mathematical concepts we ask students to make sense of.. 

Registration is required for Zoom. Register here.

*Light refreshments will be provided for in-person guests! 

Speaker:

Higinio Dominguez is an associate professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University. His research reflects his desire to emancipate humanities research that turns every difference it encounters into Eurocentric interpretations and every expressivity into the regime of a language that is faithful to rigor, causality and rationality while turning its back on love, reciprocity and possibility. Higino’s research collaborations flatten the hierarchical structures of Eurocentric humanities—structures so strong and tall that they crush and hide the diversity of human experiences. An ongoing dialogue between Indigenous Knowledges, feminism, new materialism, posthumanism and the real experiences of teachers and students in mathematics classrooms has allowed Higinio to interrogate the pervasive representationalism that has wrongly authorized researchers to speak for the other.