Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book The Mathematics in Our Hands written by Christina M Krause and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her empirical study, Christina Krause investigates how gestures can contribute to epistemic processes in social interactions. She expands the traditional speech-based approach to analyzing social processes of constructing mathematical knowledge by employing a multimodal perspective. Adopting a semiotic approach, she takes into account two functions of gestures as signs used by the participants of the social interaction: the representational function concerns the ways in which gestures take part in referring to a mathematical object in processes of knowledge construction and the epistemic function relates to the ways in which they can contribute to the performance of collective epistemic actions. The results of this study reveal that gestures influence the epistemic process significantly more than previously thought and indicate factors underlying this influence.