About Malke
Malke Rosenfeld is a percussive dance teaching artist, Heinemann author, TEDx presenter, and editor. Her interdisciplinary inquiry focuses on the intersections between percussive dance and mathematics and how to best illustrate these connections for students. Malke’s research interests include embodied cognition in mathematics learning, task and activity design in a moving math classroom, and elementary math education.
Malke delights in creating rich environments in which children and their adults can explore, make, play, and talk math based on their own questions and inclinations. In her program Math in Your Feet percussive dance becomes the platform for a robust choreographic inquiry into mathematical thinking, practices and topics. Malke's book Math on the Move: Engaging Students in Whole Body Learning is published by Heinemann in 2026 and draws on research in math education, cognitive science, and her own deep experience in the math/dance classroom to make the case for how and why the body is the perfect partner in learning math. Malke co-authored a book of games, puzzles and activities centered on the mathematics of making comparisons, published in 2016, and was curator/editor of a special issue for the Teaching Artist Journal focused on writing about teaching practice, published in October 2014. |
"Within five minutes of participating in a workshop [Malke] led for interdisciplinary arts teachers, I was inspired and curious about the mathematical ideas that were surfacing in our work ... my participation in [the] workshop changed the way I think about teaching symmetry with my future elementary teachers. Malke's work gave me a way to structure the study of transformations and symmetry that grounds my students’ learning in their physical experience and in words that meaningfully describe that experience."
-Dr. Christopher Danielson, Author of Which One Doesn't Belong, How Many?, Talking Math with Your Kids, and Common Core Math for Parents for Dummies 
"As an artist, educator, writer and editor Malke combines a deep and flexible intelligence with tremendous competence and a very rare and enthusiastically collaborative spirit ... Malke has had a remarkable and profoundly positive impact on TAJ, the journal of record for the teaching artist field ... [Her] ability to combine great inventiveness and initiative with a genuine openness to critique and revision is an inspiration to me." -Nick Jaffe, Chief Editor, Teaching Artist Journal
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