Skirt Making as an Open School, Interdisciplinary Material Activity in Mathematics, Arts and Crafts

In this chapter, we describe and analyse the design of a teaching and learning activity between mathematics and arts and crafts, centred round the making of a skirt. The context is a collaboration between two teachers and a professional seamstress in a lesson organized with relation to the “Open School Program” in Denmark, which allows for non-teachers to teach classes during school hours. The programme accentuates hands-on, product-based and interdisciplinary teaching. In this lesson, a group of 8th grade girls is encouraged to make a skirt that they would actually want to wear and hence become engaged in a process of expressing themselves, making choices of taste, but also taking measures of their own bodies, feeling the fabric and observing drafts in the mirror before refinement. In this process, they activate mathematics when needed, performing several shifts between different representational registers. In particular, we focus our analysis on their shifts between representations in two and three dimensions.