Movies and TV Series Fragments in Mathematics: Epistemic Suitability of Instructional Designs

Pablo Beltrán-Pellicer; Antonio Medina; Mercedes Quero

Authors

Pablo Beltrán-Pellicer University of Zaragoza http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1275-9976
Antonio Medina Department of Didactics, School Organization and Specific Didactics, National Distance Education University (UNED), Madrid, Spain.
Mercedes Quero Department of Didactics, School Organization and Specific Didactics, National Distance Education University (UNED), Madrid, Spain. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7658-0182

Abstract

There are plenty of books, journals and online sites devoted to the relationship between mathematics and cinema, and its educational applications, whose interest is to explore the pertinence of the instruction processes that can be designed around this resource. Instead of watching a full production, mathematics teachers that include movies and TV series in their classroom sessions, usually show short fragments, so the first step should be to consider these fragments alone to identify the mathematical objects and the involved meanings and representations. For this purpose, we use some theoretical notions from the Onto-Semiotic Approach to research in mathematics education, applying them to three excerpts from a movie and to some typical tasks designed based on them. The analysis of the involved mathematical content allows to reflect about the epistemic suitability of the instruction process, in terms of how aligned they are with the institutional meanings. The results show that it is possible to achieve a high suitability level but, most importantly, that this kind of analysis promotes teacher reflection to design teaching and learning processes.

Author Biographies

Pablo Beltrán-Pellicer, University of Zaragoza

Assistant professor. Didactics of Mathematics Department (University of Zaragoza)
Antonio Medina, Department of Didactics, School Organization and Specific Didactics, National Distance Education University (UNED), Madrid, Spain.

Antonio Medina is Professor at UNED University (Spain) in the Department of Teaching and School Organization, and has been Director of the Department for over 25 years. He has supervised more than 100 doctoral theses and numerous research papers in Spanish and in an international context. He has been invited professor in several universities, and in 2010, he was appointed as Professor Honoris Causa in the IUNIR (Argentina) and in the University of Santander (Mexico) in 2015.
Mercedes Quero, Department of Didactics, School Organization and Specific Didactics, National Distance Education University (UNED), Madrid, Spain.

Mercedes Quero is Associate Professor at UNED University (Spain) in the Department of Teaching and School Organization. She is an expert in the field of audio-visual narrative and hypermedia. For six years she was Associate Professor at the Complutense University of de Madrid, teaching Film Direction, being also audio-visual scriptwriter. She has stayed at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris III), University of California (Berkeley) and the International School of Cinema and Television in San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba). Her current research interests gravitate around organization and management of socio-educational institutions, ICT in education, models for socio-educational intervention and discourse analysis (video games and film, audio-visual fiction).