Taking Up Possibilities: How Learning Environments Shape Who Learners Can Be

It is easy to believe that we are who we are because of our efforts and proclivities—success (or failure) typically feels very agentic. As individuals, is can be difficult to see how our environment—the people we interact with, the expectations they have for us, and the basic tools and resources that are available—plays a role in our experience—unless, of course, something becomes an obstacle.

Analytically, however, it is crystal clear that environments are fundamentally and constantly organizing possibilities for participation through affordances and the dynamic intention that is established through interaction. In this way, learning environments shape the ways we speak, move, act, think, and are recognized. In earlier work, I examined learning at the level of the classroom system, arguing that students’ dispositions toward mathematics emerge through the interaction of individual participation and the practices, norms, and opportunities made available in classrooms. This perspective challenged accounts of engagement and competence as properties of individual students, suggesting instead that who learners become is inseparable from the contexts in which they participate.

In this talk, I revisit that argument through more recent work on mathematical play, hybridity, and identity. Across these studies, I ask what becomes possible when learning environments make room for multiple ways of knowing and doing mathematics, including forms of participation that are often treated as peripheral to learning: movement, conversation, experimentation, curiosity, social interaction, and play. Drawing on research in kindergarten classrooms, I examine how “logics of control” and “logics of play” organize children’s mathematical experiences. Our findings suggest that increased regulation of children’s bodies and speech does not produce greater mathematical engagement; rather, playful environments often create richer opportunities for children to engage with mathematical ideas in different and personally meaningful ways.

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Melissa is a Professor of Mathematics Education and Learning Sciences and Learning Environment Design in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. Professor Gresalfi’s research asks a central question: How do people’s experiences in the world influence who they become: how they act, what they think about themselves, and how others come to see them? This question—how identities develop and change—is guided by a Situative perspective on learning, which drives her research into different kinds of contexts that form our experiences in the world.