|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
literate person as displaying three characteristics: knowledge of concepts, command over ways of thinking and acting, and development of capabilities. “Like literacy in reading, mathematics, science, or history, the goal of technological literacy is to provide people with the tools to participate intelligently and thoughtfully in the world around them” (NRCc, 2002, p. 3). Given the resonances between this view of technological literacy and the committee’s view of spatial literacy, and given the shared emphasis on the importance of tools for thought, the committee offers a parallel characterization of spatial literacy as constituting proficiency in terms of spatial knowledge, spatial ways of thinking and acting, and spatial capabilities. Spatial KnowledgeStudents need to know the concepts that are the building blocks for spatial thinking. There are general spatial concepts that are found in many disciplines, such as symmetry, isomorphism, reflection, orientation, rotation, and function, and spatial concepts that are tailored to a particular discipline, such as relative versus absolute distance, small versus large scale, and distance decay in geography. Students learn the meanings and uses of concepts relevant to spatial thinking in the context of specific disciplines or school subjects. Thus, in mathematics, students learn about general concepts, such as minima and maxima, and their specific forms, such as hyperbolas and parabolas. In geometry, they learn about conic sections: hyperbola, parabola, ellipse, and circle. They learn to distinguish among a torus, Mobius strip, and Klein bottle. In physics, they learn that the equilibrium position of a fixed chain is a catenary curve (or hyperbolic cosine). Even this cursory listing of concepts by discipline illustrates two fundamental educational challenges. First, there is a rich, complex, conceptual structure to the description and explanation of space to be learned within each discipline. Second, rather than coming up with an omnibus list of concepts for spatial thinking, students—and especially teachers—should identify concepts relevant to specific disciplines but should also look for common themes. They should reflect on how
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
