PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
What Would You Say You Do Here? Metaphor as a Tool to Characterize Mathematical Practice
Page: 1680
In the cognitive science literature, multiple researchers have pointed out the importance of metaphor as a cognitive mechanism for sense-making. In mathematics in particular, metaphor has been shown to be a valuable tool in making sense of and reasoning with mathematics. To our knowledge, there has been no research on the metaphors that professors use when communicating the nature of mathematical practice to students in advanced mathematics lectures. In this poster, we describe the metaphors the research team identified across 11 undergraduate mathematics lectures at the advanced level. We found metaphors used by many lecturers that convey ideas about the nature of mathematical practice. We identified the affordances of these metaphors to better understand the way that mathematicians describe mathematics as a practice to undergraduate students studying advanced mathematics at the undergraduate level.