Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Multiple Intelligences, Yea or Nay?

Alright, I am just going to dive in here and say that I have a lot of reservations about the idea that we are addressing 'kinaesthetic learners' with fancy websites like Prezi. I know, I know ... I get a rap on the knuckles and and I get to wear the dunce cap in the corner (my heart goes out to you Mr. Scotus).

First of all, what are kinaesthetic learners anyway? Well, we need to back up the truck.

I could put a link in here for Howard Gardner but you will do your own searching anyway (as any critical reader should). In a nutshell, Howard Gardner was a guy who mistrusted the concept of IQ. It was a revelation to educators and researchers alike that school typically focused its attention on a few different kinds of learning that Gardner posited as linguistic and logico-mathematical. One of the other six learners that Gardner posited was that of bodily/kinaesthetic learners.

The great news here is that for the past 20 years educators have revised the way they teach to include more of the intelligences that Gardner proposed. This absolutely has to be an improvement because education really was (and in some cases still is) being delivered in only a relatively few modes.

The bad news is that I think the model itself is limiting and not well understood or characterized. For example, why eight kinds of learners? Wikipedia says that Gardner has been considering a ninth called existential learners for some time and I have certainly witnessed other instructors add a bracketed 'spiritual learner.' Not only that but Gardner has also fallen victim to his own sort of oppositional privilege in his own selection of categories. He has been criticized on Marxist grounds concerning the socializing roles of education, feminist grounds, and more than a few others. Please see this link for one summary: http://hss.fullerton.edu/linguistics/cln/Sew-Kincheloe.pdf

Lastly, assuming that we agree that kinaesthetic learning is a distinct category, how is a web page kinaesthetic? A game is kinaesthetic if you get up and swing a controller around - though your input with the controller does not necessarily closely approximate the actions you would need to take if you were performing any given task with your body. I am not so sure that clicking with a mouse is kinaesthetic to any greater degree than turning the pages of a book. Sure, I could modify some things on some pages like wikispaces but I can and do modify real texts when I have them too - I write on them, diagram, circle, underline, paraphrase, object, occasionally swear ... But I don't consider that truly kinaesthetic. I could go on to do a direct activity after having absorbed material from a web site but I could do that just as well after having flipped through a repair manual.

In the end, I think that the use of digital media can revolutionize the presentation of materials. But make no mistake, we are talking about presentation here. Even with the technology advances we have made, we are not talking about a lot of digital developments that involve productive work on the part of students. The doing part is still very much tied to manipulable objects that may or may not have been printed off from digital resources. And this all assumes that we are treating the idea of multiple intelligences in a, well, intelligent way. I can buy that using as many modes and senses possible facilitates better rates of learning but I am pretty concerned that we are using a fairly rough tool here (and I say tool in the sense that the model of learning influences the practice of teaching). And we may not be using that tool well when we describe mouse-clicking as kinaesthetic.

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