Doctoral Students Present at Mathematics Education Conference

Doctoral student, Denish Akuom, along with his supervisor, Dr. Steven Greenstein, presented his paper, “Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Designed Manipulatives as Anchors for Their Pedagogical and Conceptual Knowledge,” at this year’s PMENA conference in Philadelphia. Congratulations Denish!

In this presentation, Denish and Dr. Greenstein share what they’ve learned about how the designing and testing of 3-D printed manipulatives by prospective elementary mathematics teachers (PMTs) acts as a creative process that reveals the potential benefits of mathematical Making in teacher learning.

Doctoral students, Erin Pomponio and Denish Akuom, along with their supervisor, Dr. Steven Greenstein, presented their paper, “Harmony and Dissonance: An Enactivist Analysis of the Struggle for Sense Making in Problem Solving,” at this year’s PMENA conference in Philadelphia. Congratulations Erin and Denish!

In this presentation, Erin, Denish, and Dr. Greenstein share their findings of an exploration of the problem solving of two learners as they aimed to make sense of fraction division by coordinating meanings across two artifacts, one being a physical manipulative and the other a written expression of the standard algorithm. In addressing the question, “How do learners make sense of and coordinate meanings across multiple representations of mathematical ideas?” they took an enactivist perspective and used tools of semiotics to analyze the ways they navigated the dissonance that arose as they sought to achieve harmony in meanings across multiple representations of ideas.