Arts-based Math Education -- Meet one of the Stars

     Through BRIDGES Math-Arts Conferences I have become acquainted with the versatile Canadian scholar, Susan Gerofsky -- and I introduce you to her varied achievements with this biographical sketch.

Susan Gerofsky is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and Environmental Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research in curriculum studies is in embodied mathematics education through the arts, movement, gesture and voice, and she is a regular contributor to Bridges Math and Art. She is active as a poet, playwright, musician and filmmaker, and works with dance and fibre arts. You'll often find her cycling around town with a baritone horn or an accordion.

Gerofsky has introduced me to the use of combinatorial patterns in bell-ringing in the structure of poems.  Here, for example, is her "Desert Poem" -- based on the pattern "Plain Hunt on Four" or PH4.

     Desert Poem     by Susan Gerofsky

          Wings over dry land
          Over wings, land dry
          Over land, wings dry
          Land over dry wings
          Land dry over wings
          Dry land wings over
          Dry wings land over
          Wings dry over land --
          Wings over dry land.

I like the way the reordering of words gives shape to new thoughts!

My introduction to Gerofsky's use of bell-ringing patterns to shape poems came from this 2018 BRIDGES Conference workshop paper -- also in that paper, the diagram below of the pattern used.

 

Here is a link to a varied list of additional BRIDGES Math-Arts contributions by Gerofsky.