Date and time: Thursday 11 December 2025, 12:00-13:00 CET (incl. FREE LUNCH*)
Speaker: Dor Abrahamson – University of California Berkeley
Title: Embodied Design: Leveraging Evolutionary Capacities as Resources for Mathematical Understanding
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://tmp06.hamtemp.hamrenmedia.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
*To get a FREE LUNCH, you need to register — first come, first served. Maximum 50 participants.
The hub will be open 30 minutes before and after the event for those who wish to stay longer.
Host: Richard Lee Davis, rldavis@kth.se
Bio: Dor Abrahamson (PhD, Learning Sciences) is a Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Education, where he directs the Design-Based Research Laboratory (edrl.berkeley.edu, est. 2005). Working with his students and international collaborators, Abrahamson innovates pedagogical resources, both mechanical and digital, for diverse populations; in turn, evaluating these applications provides an empirical context to investigate and theorize socio-cognitive processes of conceptual change.
Abrahamson is particularly interested in embodiment perspectives on the roles of sensory perception and motor action in mathematics teaching and learning.
Abstract: We arrive into the world with staggering genetic inclination to cope heuristically in our natural, social, and cultural ecology. Yet these immanent gifts, which flourish in the wild, experience complex relationships with techno-scientific analytical reconfigurations of mundane phenomena. For example, instinctive perceptual judgments of outcome likelihoods in situated random generators, which even infants perform, flagrantly ignore component features that are vital for conducting classicist probability determinations of sample spaces, along with their permutations, favorable events, and ratio calculations.
How might a constructivist paradigm tap our primate perceptuomotor adaptivity, which is often tacit and unarticulated, as cognitive wherewithal for grasping mathematical concepts that are explicitly couched in symbolic notation? The presentation will overview the two genres of embodied design — perception-based and action-based — which have been extensively researched over thirty years as pedagogical responses to the epistemic gap between informal naturalistic practice and formal analytic discourse.
