Embodied experimentation with Alberti’s Window: Two students' inquiry in projective geometry

What is it about?

This chapter responds to Ricardo Nemirovsky’s analysis of two students constructing diagrams of projections parabolas at football-field scale onto an Alberti’s Window apparatus. My analysis applies David Gooding’s (1990) concept of embodied experimentation to illuminate the ways that these two students are working to construe the “readings” they are generating, as they work with the Alberti’s Window apparatus. They do interesting and serious work (a) to stabilize the optical phenomena they are producing; (b) to develop confidence that they are seeing the same things; (c) to interpret the meaning of the phenomena they are producing; and (d) to reason about how these phenomena might change under changing circumstances.

Featured Image

Photo by Emmanuel Cassar on Unsplash

Photo by Emmanuel Cassar on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Each of the students' actions above represents a significant interactional and embodied achievement, and each demands distributed work and coordination between the students, the Alberti’s Window apparatus, and the world. I argue that Nemirovsky’s activity design places the students in an epistemological position similar to that of innovative scientists when they are making sense of new phenomena produced by scientific instruments. Coordinating their joint activity, the Alberti’s Window apparatus, and the world is challenging and typical of scientific inquiry that engages with making meaning of novel data and novel theoretical constructs. The students’ experience is extremely rich and productive; this is demonstrated both by Nemirovsky’s own analysis and by this chapter’s layered reinterpretation.

Perspectives