Several initiatives linking body language to learning already exist in France and are worth noting. Lara Thomas, a mathematic university professor, uses body language to share concepts such as right angles, circles, vectors, and matrices… with students and youth in dance workshops. Performances and video clips extend the pleasure and create opportunities to share with a wider audience in the context of fruitful exchanges.
« Danse tes Maths » Larra Thomas’s workshop
Mathematician Marie Lhuissier enchants mathematics with her musical storytelling shows and her geometric weaving and snowflake-making workshops that engage the imagination and the body to create beauty.
Marie Lhuissier workshop
Karelle Martin, a former schoolteacher, practices kinesiology, a set of gentle techniques to maintain or restore the overall balance of the children in her care. Based on brain gym techniques and recent neurological research, she sets up adapted protocols to each of her little patients to release blockages, work on postural reflexes and offer them the possibility to rediscover the joy of learning.
Example of brain gym’s workshop
In addition, initiatives such as those of Profissime, through an internet program called « Maths en mouvement », which proposes students exercises to play, move and revise, complete this far from exhaustive picture.
Developing techniques and protocols to allow young people to learn in a simple and natural way is to offer them the possibility to be more receptive. Invoking movement in the act of learning allows the body’s intelligence to be set in motion and intuition to be awakened. From then on, the sciences and more particularly mathematics, cease to be abstract and be transformed into objects of pleasure and exchange.
The Math&Move project will respond to this problem over 24 months by creating, for the greater benefits of all, a panel of freely accessible tools for learners and the adults in charge of them.