Building knowledge: the ecological dynamics of co-operative action in collaborative construction of body-scale geometric structures

Background: Situated in a design-based project, this empirical investigation of learning theory explores collaborative construction’s educational potential via a case of four graduate students collaboratively building a body-scale icosahedron without a step-by-step assembly manual. Drawing on Learning Sciences perspectives on cognition and interaction, we aim to characterize how participants succeeded in building the structure and what geometric content they may have learned in the process. Method: We microgenetically analyzed multimodal interaction in an exploratory activity, coordinating ecological dynamics (attentional anchors) with co-operative action (semiotic substrates; professional vision). We analyzed post-construction problem solving to trace shifts from embodied know-how to formal know-what. Findings: Participants constructed the model through iterative cycles: detecting constraints; imagining attentional anchors; collaboratively negotiating discursive strategies for coordinating co-operative action; materially realizing goal structures that generated new unanticipated circumstances. Emergent perceptual forms were communicated multimodally, sedimenting individual know-how into the substrate—a curated archive of heterogeneous semiotic contributions that scaffolded the team’s evolving professional vision. Contribution: We submit a networked synthesis comprising embodiment theories of perceptual learning and cognitive-anthropological models of joint action, theorizing how sensorimotor percepts become publicly shared knowledge through multimodal coordination. This integration models how attentional anchors emerge and stabilize within a semiotic substrate, thus bridging embodied know-how and discursive know-what in collective mathematical reasoning and construction. We speculate on the pedagogical utility of learning environments that simulate culturally–historically authentic mathematical semiosis as emerging in, for, and from collective practice of coordinated action.