Mathematics and the Body

Elizabeth de Freitas is an associate professor at the Ruth S. Ammon School of Education at Adelphi University. She is the co-editor of Opening the Research Text: Critical Insights and In(ter)ventions into Mathematics Education (2008) and an associate editor of the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics. Nathalie Sinclair is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, an associate member in the Department of Mathematics and a Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning at Simon Fraser University. She is also an associate editor of For the Learning of Mathematics. She is the author of Mathematics and Beauty: Aesthetic Approaches to Teaching Children (2006) and Developing Essential Understanding of Geometry for Teaching Mathematics (2012), among other books.

• Introduction; 1. When does a body become a body?; 2. The 'ontological turn' of inclusive materialism; 3. Diagrams, gestures, movement; 4. Inventiveness in the mathematics classroom; 5. Materialist approaches to mathematics classroom discourse; 6. The sensory politics of the body mathematical; 7. Mapping the cultural formation of the mathematical aesthetic; 8. The virtuality of mathematical concepts; Conclusion.

'This book is a fabulous and timely contribution. It is a much-needed and radical critique of current embodied approaches within mathematics education, arguing that such approaches have, in large part, retained the very splits (inner/outer, individual/social) that they hoped to overcome. The scholarship is excellent and the writing is clear and concise.' Alf Coles, University of Bristol