A teacher assigns students a project to create models of objects demonstrating…

Concept: In the pedagogy of mathematics, the reasons for teaching the subject are stated as its values or importance. The recognised list includes the utilitarian value (its use in everyday affairs), the disciplinary value (the training it gives in reasoning and accuracy), the cultural and aesthetic values (its place in civilisation and the beauty of its patterns), and the interdisciplinary or correlational value. This last one says that mathematical structures such as symmetry, proportion, ratio and pattern are the organising grammar of other domains, so mathematics works as a base on which art, design, science and technology are built. A classroom activity that deliberately places a mathematical idea inside another subject is appealing to this value.

Applying it here: The pupils build models whose defining property is symmetry, which is a geometric relation, and the medium in which they build them is art and craft. The mathematics is not being rehearsed for its own sake and is not itself the finished product; it supplies the structure that the artistic object is organised around. Art therefore stands on a mathematical base, which is exactly what is meant by calling mathematics an interdisciplinary foundation.

Contrasting the alternatives: Contrasting the alternatives by what each would look like in a classroom:

• Strict procedural practice would appear as repeated drill on one fixed algorithm, and this project prescribes no algorithm to rehearse.

• Exclusive logical reasoning would appear as deduction and proof, and nothing in the task has to be proved.

• Singular focus on numbers would appear as computation with numerals, whereas symmetry is a spatial relation and no quantity is calculated here.

Result: The project therefore highlights the interdisciplinary foundation that mathematics provides. NCERT's art-integrated learning framework describes art integration in the same terms, as a cross-curricular and interdisciplinary approach, and uses symmetry as one of its mathematics-and-art exemplars.