~ The MI News ~
Summer 2003 Edition (Volume 5, Number 2) |
Publisher Branton Shearer | Editor
Cliff Morris |
This electronic-only
(spring, summer, fall, and winter) newsletter is provided
by Dr. Charles Branton Shearer's Multiple Intelligences (MI) Research and Consulting.
Since 1999, we have published two version of the newsletter: this web version
and a corresponding email version. While both versions contain the same content,
the email version is more abbreviated that this version. In the email version,
readers are only introduced to each section and then asked to click on a
corresponding web site link for the full-text version. Here are five items
about the email version.
If you have creative ideas about Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), have a tried-and-tested MI-based lesson plan, or you have some practical MI suggestions that you feel our readers would enjoy viewing, please email me, Clifford Morris. While we foster readers to become familiar with our own MI newsletter, we also bring to your attention two (2) other just excellent MI newsletters. Both are excellent newsletters and contain practical articles, meaningful programs, and innovative approaches. To read all of the fine issues of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) MI-SIG' newsletters, click here. And to read another series of fine newsletters, published by the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), please feel free to click here.
Finally, and as an aside, I was in Chicago during the week of
April 20-27 to attend the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association (AERA). It was a privilege for me to meet so many MI
followers. They flew in from all corners of the world to celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of the publication of Gardner's Frames of Mind: The
Theory of Multiple Intelligences and to partake in the special three-day MI
Symposium.
Table of Contents |
1.
20 years of Multiple
Intelligences: Reflections and a Blueprint for the Future by Howard Gardner
2.
Mind / Brain Relations and
Multiple Intelligences by Patricia
Carpenter
3.
The Multiple Intelligences
of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive by Thomas Armstrong
1. 20 years of Multiple
Intelligences: Reflections and a Blueprint for the Future by Howard Gardner
On Monday, April 21, during a
Presidential Invited Sessions, at the 2003 Annual AERA Meeting, I sat in front
of Howard Gardner as he sketched the evolution, development and future
possibilities of his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The title of his
commentary was 20 years of Multiple Intelligences: Reflections and a
Blueprint for the Future. Here are seven (7) quotes taken (out of context)
from the first part of his interesting talk.
1. ... In 1967 my continuing interest in the arts
prompted me to become a founding member of Project Zero, a basic research group
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education begun by a noted philosopher of
art, Nelson Goodman. For 28 years, I was the co-director of Project Zero
and I am happy to say that the organization continues to thrive ...
2. ... I was fascinated by [Norman]
Geschwind’s discussion of what happens to once normal or gifted individuals who
have the misfortune of suffering from a stroke or some other form of brain
damage ... I ended up working for twenty years on a neuropsychological unit,
trying to understand the organization of human abilities in the brain ...
3. ... In 1979, a group of researchers affiliated
with the Harvard Graduate School of Education received a sizeable grant
from a Dutch foundation, the Bernard Van Leer Foundation ... When we carved out
our respective projects, I received an interesting assignment: to write a book
about what had been established about human cognition through discoveries in
the biological and behavioral sciences. Thus was born the research
program that led to the theory of multiple intelligences.
4. Support from the Van Leer Foundation allowed me to
carry out an extensive research program ... I saw this as a[n] ... opportunity
to collate and synthesize what I and others had learned about the development
of cognitive capacities in normal and gifted children as well as the breakdown
of such capacities in individuals who suffered some form of pathology ... My
colleagues and I combed the literature from brain study, genetics,
anthropology, and psychology in an effort to ascertain the optimal taxonomy of
human capacities.
5. I can identify a number of crucial turning points in
this investigation ... I decided to call these faculties “multiple
intelligences” rather than abilities or gifts ... This seemingly minor lexical
substitution proved very important ... A second crucial point was the creation
of a definition of an intelligence and the identification of a set of criteria
that define what is, and what is not, an intelligence ... I feel that the
definition and the criteria are among the most original parts of the work ...
6. ... given the mission of the Van Leer Foundation, it
was clear to me that I needed to say something about the educational
implications of MI theory ... I conducted some research on education and
touched on some educational implications of the theory ... This decision turned
out to be another crucial point because it was educators, rather than
psychologists, who found the theory of most interest ...
7. ... The main lines of the argument had become
clear. I was claiming that all human beings possess not just a single
intelligence (often called “g” for general intelligence). Rather, as a
species we human beings are better described as having a set of relatively
autonomous intelligences ... While we all have these intelligences, individuals
differ for both genetic and experiential reasons in their respective profiles
of intellectual strengths and weaknesses. No intelligence is in and of
itself artistic or non-artistic; rather several intelligences can be put to
aesthetic ends, if individuals so desire ...
To read the full-text of his talk, go to http://pzweb.harvard.edu/PIs/HG.htm
and click on the "NEW" link, on the left hand side of his home
page.
2. Mind / Brain Relations
and Multiple Intelligences by Patricia Carpenter
Later on in that same afternoon, I
was again privileged to hear another MI commentary ... only this time from Dr.
Patricia Carpenter, currently the Lee and Marge Gregg Professor of Psychologist
at Carnegie Mellon University and also a member of the Center for the Neural
Basis of Cognition. As one of the pioneers in the study of language and
reading comprehension, she is actively engaged in applying the results of
neuroscience research findings from traditional behavioral studies of
cognition. Her ongoing research interests include mental imagery, problem
solving, language comprehension, and visually-based problem solving.
Here is what she said at that time:
"After a career of examining
individual differences in cognition and almost a decade of using neuroimaging,
it is a delight to bring these research interests to bear on the issue of
multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983, 1999). Before addressing multiple
intelligences, I think it is crucial to try to understand the relationship
between what we call 'mind,' that is, the processes of perceiving, thinking and
acting, and the brain. I will summarize a novel proposal (Davia, 2003)
that may solve some fundamental issues in my field and help us understand
better the multiple intelligences, our own as well as those with whom we
interact in our classrooms.
The success of neuroimaging, that
is, our technical ability to monitor and quantify the waves of activity that
occur as someone looks at a checkerboard or solves a mental rotation problem,
has led to some paradoxes. Let me give two examples. One is that
the areas and amount of activation depends on the skills of the individual
relative to the task. For example, in a mental rotation task, there is a
network of activity in various areas (including the parietal and inferior
temporal regions), and the amount of activity increases with the difficulty of
the problem (Carpenter, et al., 1999); similar results have been found across
all sorts of tasks, language comprehension, objects recognition.
Similarly, early stages of learning to rotate (in Tetris) are characterized by
widespread activation; skill results in much, much less (Haier et al.,
1992). Clearly, the brain is intimately involved in mind, but we do not
yet have a non-reductionist answer to the question:
How do we ground our understanding
of perceptions -thoughts -actions in biology?
One difficulty might be that in
cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we generally assume that the
mind/brain represents an external world. This representation assumption
is widespread in spite of a number of baffling questions that it leaves in its
wake. One is accounting for how perception changes as you learn, for
example, as you become a chess player, a reader, a musician, a teacher or a
radiologist. Perception isn't some neutral, unedited snapshot of
the world; it depends in part on the expertise of the perceiver!
But not every theorist accepts the
representation assumption. The perceptual psychologist, J. J. Gibson
(1979) argued against it and emphasized that perception is sensitive to
invariants (spatial relations that persist through time). I think the
best evidence for Gibson comes from recent sensory substitution research
helping the blind to see. One of the most compelling demonstrations, by
Meijer (2002), uses auditory 'sound-scapes' generated by a camera that sweeps
the scene from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, and varies the amplitude
according to the intensity. The fact that a person who was blind was able
to learn to see after working with this system for two years is consistent with
the hypothesis that visual perception depends on invariants, not the eyes per
se. Also, dynamic systems theorists have argued against representation
assumption (e.g., Swenson & Turvey, 1991; Thelen & Smith, 1994; van Gelder,
1998).
Nevertheless, a second question
is: What alternative is there to the hypothesis that we represent or code
an external world?
To address these issues, let's
consider a novel proposal by Davia (2003) on the relation of mind and brain, a
proposal that is related to other proposals about embodied cognition (Maturana
& Varela, 1980; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). Because my time
is brief, this is an invitation for you to read these proposals and begin a
dialogue (Davia, 2003).
First, like the neuroscientists
Maturana and Varela, Davia suggests that we root our understanding of cognitive
processing in living systems. Specifically, he asked 'how do living
systems, whether a human being, an organ or cell, maintain their organization
in environments that includes other complex, dynamic systems; what enables
their ability to persist?' Or relatedly, we are used to thinking about
physiological systems that have 'functions' such as perception, memory,
language. What enables those 'functional' systems to persist as organized
entities? Are there yet other systems that maintain those systems; and if
so, might there not be an infinite regress?
For a specific answer, Davia (2003)
looked to catalysts, such as enzymes, and the process of catalysis.
Enzymes are molecules that speed a chemical reaction and then emerge
unchanged. Catalysis, at an abstract level, is the process of moving to a
more stable thermodynamic state; two less stable molecular reagents may combine
into a single, more thermodynamically stable product. Catalysis is a process by
which structural hindrances (such as the shapes of the molecules) are somehow
overcome to facilitate the thermodynamic reaction. A basic summary
of his thesis is:
There is a single process that underlies
all living processes, including neural processes and psychological processes.
That process is catalysis.
To go to the end-point of his
thesis, Davia argues that in a very real way, not metaphorically, our
perceptions, our thoughts, and our very being are catalytic processes that make
explicit the implicit orders (invariants) that are present in our environment;
the brain is a catalyst.
Recent research that suggests that
enzyme catalysis may involve soliton waves (Davia, 2003). Solitons
were discovered in water in a canal in the mid-1800's. They are very
robust, solitary waves (hence, solitons) that maintain their energy and
structure while traveling a relatively long distance. They are on the
cusp between ordinary, dissipative, linear waves and chaotic, white-water
waves. Solitons are a vibrational mode of the enzyme that enables
the molecular reagents to overcome the structural hindrance (their normal
shapes) that typically stand in the way of their 'getting together.'
Importantly, solitons can only persist in environments with order or
invariants. Davia suggests that they persist by utilizing that order.
Key to Davia's argument is his
observation that solitons are ubiquitous in living systems, not just at
the level of the enzyme, but also in muscle contraction and expansion, protein
folding, and the surface of cells. The neural action of the heart conforms to a
soliton, and importantly, neural firings are solitons. In other
words, the solitonic mechanism may not just mediate catalysis at enzymatic
level, but also up the scale to the action of neurons.
Perhaps you've followed this
argument sufficiently to understand what catalysis might mean for enzymes at
the molecular level. But what might it mean for the brain? The
suggestion is that the brain provides paths for the energy that arises from
glucose and oxygen to dissipate according to the invariants in the patterns
that are imposed by the senses and the body (Davia, 2003). We are not
representing the patterns in the environment, we are catalyzing those patterns.
What intuition might clarify this
new way of thinking about the mind/brain relation? Imagine a child she
can recognize a visual pattern, looking at a pattern of dots that happen to
make what we recognize as a pattern, say a triangle (borrowed from
Davia). In the V-1 layer of her cortex, there are chaotic neural firings,
dissipative and white-water waves of energy. But at some point, when the
child first perceives the triangle, the spatial relations that define the
triangle persist, perhaps sustaining a solitonic wave of neural activity. Thus,
the triangle is not the pattern of dots, but actually is made explicit by the
child's phenomenology. The triangle comes into being in her experience.
When the tree falls in the forest, there are waves, but sound occurs if the
woodcutter's neural system metabolizes that pattern. Our experience, the
very stuff of our human lives, occurs not by representing some fixed outside
environment, but by making explicit the patterns (invariances) through the process
of catalysis.
Such a process provides a possible
mechanism for the direct perception discussed by Gibson (1979) and others
(including Shepard, 1984). It suggests that the brain is attempting to find
paths to dissipate the energy imposed by the senses and tasks; of course, the
disspation paths are novel when a skill is only being learned. Expertise
involves the automatic invocation of the appropriate strategies; the brain may
be trying to get to a place where it doesn't have to change (Davia, 2003). It
provides a way to explain how expertise influences perception; expertise is, in
part, increasing sensitivity to patterns in the environment, at several levels.
The theory provides a possible mechanism to explain how sensory substitution,
including Meijer's sound-scapes, might enable an individual who is blind to see
with an entirely different sensory input. The ability of waves of neural
activity to be sustained in the brain depends upon the invariants on the
environment, imposed by the senses. The real revolutionary implication is that
we are not representing a fixed, exterior environment, rather, the very
phenomenology of perception makes explicit the patterns. We do not
fantasize the world, but neither is it independent of the perceiver.
Davia's proposal is a theory, just
like information processing is a theory, but I believe it has some profound
implications for how we view multiple intelligences. First, there is the
fractal nature of catalysis; fractals are associated with self-similar structures
that have a theme but also variety. Davia's theory suggests that living
processes are mediating our environments at all levels, essentially fractal
processes. Their apparent dissimilarity may be the result of the fact
that catalysts at a 'higher level' catalyze different, more complex
environments. The fractal nature of catalysis reflects the inherent
creativity of living processes. So I would agree with Howard Gardner that
there are multiple intelligences, but this model suggests that seven does not
capture the inherent variability in human experience. Just as the number
of different snow flakes may be infinite, so too human intelligences, in the
sense of human phenomenologies.
Second, this theory suggests an
intimate relation between environment and phenomenology; we are not agents that
are independent of our environments. Our experiences, the phenomenology
that constitutes of our lives, are very much dependent on the transitions of
the environments that we are catalyzing.
The metabolism that constitutes
perceiving and thinking, are anchored in our bodies and nervous systems. The
model may give a new role to the intelligence that is carried in the body, that
constitutes the expertise we've implicitly acquired from our experience in the
world. Of course, we can build on that expertise through instruction, but
it suggests a key role for learning-by-doing.
I honor Gardner's theories because
they have opened up the concepts of intelligence and creativity and made both
concepts richer and more varied than were acknowledged previously in my
field. Davia's proposal takes Gardner's ideas in a new direction,
suggesting that the variety underlying 'intelligence' is much greater, as it is
in all living processes; it suggests that creativity is central to phenomenology.
Both insights, I hope, will inform and change how it is that we help our
children learn to be in the world."
References
Carpenter, P. A., Just, M. A.,
Keller, T. A., Eddy, W. F., & Thulborn, K. R. (1999). Graded
functional activation in the visuo-spatial system with the amount of task
demand. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11
Davia, C.J. (2003). Minds,
brains and catalysis: An ontological approach. Manuscript submitted
to Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Available from the author (Davia@andrew.cmu.edu); Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.
Gardner,
H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
New York: Basic Books.
Gardner,
H. (1999). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st
Century. New York: Basic Books
Gibson,
J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Haier, R. et al.
(1992) Cortical glucose metabolic rate correlates of abstract reasoning and
attention studied with positron emission tomography. Intelligence,
12, 199-217.
Maturana, H. R., &
Varela, F. J., (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living. Vol. 42: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Meijer, P. (2002) Sensory
Substitution I: Visual Consciousness in Blind Subjects? Presentation in the
Tucson 2002 conference, "Toward a science of consciousness."
Tucson, AZ.
Reichle, E. D.,
Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (2000) The neural bases of strategy
and skill in sentence-picture verification. Cognitive Psychology,
40, 261-295.
Swenson, R., &
Turvey, M. T. (1991). Thermodynamic reasons for perception-action cycles.
Ecological Psychology, 3, 317-348.
Thelen, E. & Smith,
L. B., (1994). A Dynamical Systems Approach to Development of Cognition and
Action. MIT, MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press.
van Gelder, T. (1998).
The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
21 (5): 615-665.
Varela,
F., J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3. The Multiple Intelligences of
Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive by Thomas Armstrong
In The Multiple Intelligences of
Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive, Thomas Armstrong shows
us, once again, how to use Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences to
help anyone, especially students, to become more effective readers and writers
by connecting words to images, feelings, logic, physical expression, music,
social interaction, oral language, and nature. This informative book provides
numerous ideas, strategies, tips and resources for teaching everything from
grammar and spelling to word decoding and reading comprehension.
Here is the Table of Contents to
that book with items 2-4 available on-line for your viewing.
1.
Dedication
2.
Introduction
3.
Chapter 1. Literacy, Multiple Intelligences, and the
Brain
4.
Chapter 2. Coming to Grips with the Musculature of Words
5.
Chapter 3. Seeing the Visual
Basis of Literacy
6.
Chapter 4. Grooving with the
Rhythms of Language
7.
Chapter 5. Calculating the
Logic of Words
8.
Chapter 6. Feeling the
Emotional Power of Text
9.
Chapter 7. Relating to the
Social Context of Literacy
10. Chapter 8. Speaking Out About the Oral Basis of
Reading and Writing
11. Chapter 9. Opening the Book of Nature
12. Conclusion
13. References
The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive
Introduction
This book has its origins in two separate but related issues in my life, one
a joyful personal experience and the other a professional conundrum. First, let
me speak of the joyful experience. About five years ago, I happened to be
watching a videotape of the Al Pacino film Looking for Richard. In this
picture, which is part documentary and part Shakespearean performance, Pacino
takes the viewer through the various stages of putting on the play Richard
III. We see the actors meeting to discuss roles, we hear interviews with
people on the street concerning their feelings about Shakespeare, we see Pacino
himself commenting on the play and its history, and we get, of course, several
scenes from the play itself. Seeing this picture was a kind of miraculous
turning point for me in my intellectual life. Before this, I had not been much
of a reader since college 25 years earlier.
Just to give you a sense of where I was at with literacy, when I was a
teacher in the public school system I remember taking some courses for the
purpose of obtaining a salary increment, but I was so lazy or so “a-literate“
(able to read but choosing not to) that I read the Cliffs Notesinstead
of the actual texts. After seeing Looking for Richard, however, I
started to read Shakespeare's plays. I read the mass-market paperback versions
put out by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. I liked them
because they put the explanations of difficult words and phrases on the facing
page instead of in footnotes at the bottom of the page (this arrangement
prevented me from getting dizzy or headachy through moving my head up and down
all the time). I devoured most of the plays in a matter of months. I loved
them!
After Shakespeare's plays, I went on to other books and authors. I became
interested in the whole Western cultural tradition. I purchased taped courses
from The Teaching Company (www.teach12.com),
an organization that tapes lectures from some of the best college professors in
the country on a variety of topics in the humanities and the sciences. I
especially loved the taped lectures on American and British literature by
Professor Arnold Weinstein of Brown University. I began (finally) to do the
reading for my courses. I fell in love with Plato's The Republic and
Dante's The Divine Comedy, with Rabelais, with the Argentinean writer
Jorge Luis Borges (the Rod Serling of the international literary world), with
Hemingway, Faulkner, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas More, Homer, Thoreau, Dickens,
Woolf, Joyce, Austen, Ellison, Morrison; books became like salted peanuts to
me. I just couldn't stop! The time that I had been spending before bedtime
flipping through the several hundred channels of my cable system, I now spent
reading. And it's amazing how much reading a person can do in a few years if he
reads for just an hour or two a day. At any rate, what I'm trying to say is
that after 25 years as an educator, I finally started to become truly literate
myself. This naturally filled me with a desire to share my joy in some way with
the world. So, the idea of writing a book that would help children and adults
learn how to read and write, so that they too could experience the wonder and
excitement of the written word, seemed very appropriate to me as a next step in
my own development.
Now, on to the conundrum. Back in the late 1980s, when the theory of
multiple intelligences (MI theory) was still in its infancy and I was beginning
to do workshops for educators on this emerging topic, I was often asked a
question that made me uncomfortable. Though it was asked in different ways, the
basic question almost always took something close to the following form: “Both
you and Howard Gardner say that there are many different ways to learn and
teach. But right now you are lecturing to us about multiple intelligences in
only one intelligence: linguistic intelligence. Doesn't that tell us that this
particular intelligence is the most important one?“ There would usually be a
momentary silence, following which I would hem and haw and tell them that, if I
wanted to, I could sing to them about multiple intelligences, dance the
multiple intelligences, draw the multiple intelligences, and so forth. But the
fact is, I didn't. Over time, in part as a response to this question, I learned
to incorporate all the intelligences into my workshops so that participants would
be singing, chanting, dancing, drawing, visualizing, and in other ways using
all eight of Gardner's intelligences. The fact that I did this, coupled with
the increasing acceptance of MI theory as a mainstream concept in education,
eventually caused this question to go away. Nowadays, I almost never get asked
a question like this at my workshops. Perhaps I should shout “Hurrah! I made
the bad question go away!“ and go on to other matters. The truth is, however,
that I am still troubled by the question, and even quietly disappointed that
nobody asks it very much anymore. Because I think the question is still a valid
one and quite fundamental to the ongoing discourse on multiple intelligences.
Consider the following. Gardner initially introduced the theory of multiple
intelligences to the world through a book: Frames of Mind. This book
received many awards, tremendous media publicity (incredible for a book on
education), and was ultimately named by Education Week as one of the 100
most influential education books of the 20th century. One might argue
persuasively that the entire theory of multiple intelligences, and the great
changes that it has evoked in thousands of schools worldwide, originally
emerged from this single linguistic product. Add to this comments by
Gardner to interviewers that his own teaching style at the Harvard School of
Education relies heavily on lectures and reading. Further consider that
although there are multimedia products, videos, and other nonlinguistic
resources available for communicating about the concepts of multiple
intelligences, the vast bulk of materials on MI theory are in the form of
books, articles, audiotapes, and other linguistic sources. Finally, it
should be noted that although I do involve my workshop participants actively in
all eight of the intelligences, the largest part of my workshops, by far, are
taken up by my own lectures, group discussions, questions and answers, and
handouts“all of them, linguistic teaching strategies. It might also be
added, almost parenthetically, that what you are holding in your hands right
now also is a linguistic product: a book that is attempting to come to
grips with all of this.
What if Gardner had originally decided to present his ideas about multiple
intelligences in the form of a song? Would anybody have listened? What if he
had choreographed the concept and presented it as a dance at a large theater
hall? Would anybody have showed up? What I am trying to point out here is that
the question I was so bothered about in my early workshops is still alive and
deserves to be brought to the surface and openly debated in the fullest
possible way. There seems to be a basic contradiction when it comes to the
actual practice of the theory of multiple intelligences. On the one hand, we
say that students should be able to learn and be taught in many different
intelligences. On the other hand, when we look at what our culture actually does,
what it values most, what it spends most of its time focusing on, we find linguistic
intelligence far ahead of the pack. (One might successfully argue a case for
the primacy of logical-mathematical intelligence, as well, in our culture.
However, consider what would have happened if Gardner had originally introduced
MI theory as a series of equations or algorithms. Would anybody have cared? Would
anybody have been able to figure them out?)
It's certainly possible to argue, as I and many others have, that while our
culture may value linguistic intelligence above the other seven, it certainly shouldn't
continue to do so. The theory of multiple intelligences, in this view, serves
as a critique of the values of our schools and our culture, suggesting that we
need to pay much more attention to the neglected intelligences, especially
those such as spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, and naturalist, that may be
particular strengths of individuals who have had special difficulties in
successfully making their way through our heavily linguistic schools. Taken in
this manner, MI theory serves as an important impetus toward fundamental
reforms of our educational system, leading to a re-evaluation of those subjects
typically taught in school, with increased emphasis placed on the arts, nature,
physical culture, and other topics traditionally limited to the periphery of
the curriculum.
I continue to argue for such substantial reforms. However, there is also a
part of me that understands and accepts the situation, perhaps more fully than
before, that linguistic intelligence happens to be what is most valued right
now. And not just right now. I would argue that since the beginning of
recorded time, linguistic intelligence has held sway in an imposing manner over
the other seven intelligences. In fact, by definition, recorded time began when
people first recorded information through the written word. We have cave
drawings going back tens of thousands of years. We have simple tools going back
much farther than that. However, archeologists are unable to reconstruct a
clear sense of what individuals were thinking about in those ancient times just
by looking at these artifacts, despite a valiant attempt to do so through the
emerging field of cognitive archeology. And yet, we can get inside the
thoughts of a Sumerian scribe living almost 5,000 years ago when he wrote these
words in ancient cuneiform to his menial assistant: “You dolt, numbskull,
school pest, you Sumerian ignoramus, your hand is terrible; it cannot even hold
the stylus properly; it is unfit for writing and cannot even take dictation.
Yet you say you are a scribe like me“ (quoted in McGuinness, 1985, p. 234).
Some things never change!
From ancient civilizations to the present time, the balance of power has
resided in people who were literate. The scribes of early history were closely
allied to the rulers and were part of the power elite. Writing about ancient
Mayan civilization, for example, Kevin J. Johnston of Ohio State University
notes: “Texts were a medium through which kings asserted and displayed power“
(Johnston, 2001). For further ancient examples, one has only to think of the
Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, and the inscriptions of the Persian
king Darius cut high up into an inaccessible portion of a cliff in western
Iran. The ancient writing surface, papyrus, gets its name from an Egyptian word
pa-en-per-aa meaning “that which belonged to the king“ (Robinson, 1995,
p. 107). The overwhelming portion of writing from both the ancient and modern
worlds was written by those who had shares in the riches and powers of the
elite. We will never know what sorts of thoughts, hopes, wishes, needs, or frustrations
ran through the minds of millions of slaves, poor farmers, artisans, soldiers,
wives, and other dispossessed peoples during the vast majority of recorded
history, because these individuals were never given the opportunity to develop
literacy.
In the present day, literacy continues to serve as a requirement for
membership in the upper classes in most parts of the world. Educators such as
Paulo Freire have argued persuasively that literacy represents a key tool for
social change, and for the empowerment of oppressed peoples (Freire, 2000). In
American culture, those individuals who are at the top of the social structure
are those who are most fully literate, and conversely, those who lack literacy
skills occupy the lowest rungs of the social ladder. You can go into a cocktail
party and make people laugh empathetically with a comment like: “Gee, I've
never been able to balance my checkbook“ or “I've never been able to dance (or
draw) well.“ But try saying “Gee, I've never learned how to read or write“ and
imagine what kind of response you're likely to get. Stunned silence, most
likely. Not to be able to read in our culture is a source of shame and
humiliation for many. One can say this is society's fault, and that we put too
much emphasis on words in our culture, but those are the facts and we have to
live and deal with the situation and what it means for the students who are in
our charge. Whether we like it or not, one of the best things that we as
educators can do to help our students achieve success in this culture is to
assist them in becoming as fully literate as possible.
Now, however, we encounter another sort of difficulty. Many children and
adults in America struggle with reading and writing, both in school and as a
part of normal living outside of school. According to a study done by the Yale
School of Medicine, some 20 percent of American school children“or 10 million
kids“have some kind of “reading disorder“ (Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz,
Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992). The assessment of 4th grade reading conducted as
part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2000 shows
declines from previous years among the poorest readers, while all other groups
at higher levels of reading proficiency show stable patterns of achievement or even
increases over time (Donahue, Finnegan, Lutkus, Allen, & Campell, 2001). A
recent National Institute for Literacy report suggests that 40 to 44 million
Americans are “functionally illiterate.“ Clearly, the problem of literacy is a
national dilemma.
Educators, researchers, scientists, and others have written extensively on
why so many people in the United States struggle with literacy, despite the
fact that we have one of the most highly developed educational systems in the
world. Some suggest that social inequities are the cause. Others point to
neurological abnormalities of genetic origin. Some indicate that not enough
phonics is the culprit. Others put forth still newer theories to prove their
case. What we really need, however, are not reasons or excuses for why so many
children and adults are not literate, but rather positive solutions for helping
empower everyone with the skills of literacy. It is here where I believe the
theory of multiple intelligences can, curiously, make one of its most valuable
contributions to education. In this book, I advocate an approach to literacy
based on the belief that there is no one best way to teach reading and writing
skills, in part because each person is so differently organized neurologically,
and that the best attitude to adopt in any literacy program is a
multiple-solution focus. In this book I show that reading and writing are not
simply linguistic acts; they involve all of the intelligences, and many more
areas of the brain are involved in literacy acquisition than has previously
been assumed by educators working in the field. We have limited ourselves too
much in the past“even in the field of MI theory“by considering too narrow a
range of interventions, and ignoring many other strategies that are available for
helping children and adults acquire literacy skills.
Reading and writing are unique evolutionary features of the human species
that represent the tail end of a long and carefully articulated process of
development over time. I show in this book how literacy emerged out of our oral
language capacities, our logical capabilities, our physical movements, our
image-making abilities, our musical proclivities, our emotional life, our
attempts to decipher and control nature, and our impulse to connect meaningfully
with others. Moreover, I point out how reading and writing, while definitely
distinctive activities in their own right, still retain close connections to
these broader aspects of human potential. Literacy is far too recent a
development in human life for it to be otherwise. I suggest that a revolution
of sorts is required in the way that we think about reading and writing, so
that more of the brain's power may be brought to bear upon the acquisition of
these valued skills.
The first chapter summarizes the basics of multiple intelligences theory,
and provides an overview of the connections that reading and writing have with
different areas of the brain, including not simply those areas typically tied
to language functions (e.g., Broca's area, Wernicke's area), but also with
areas associated with emotion, music, imagery, and motor activity. Each
subsequent chapter examines the relationship of reading and writing to a
different intelligence within MI theory. Following Howard Gardner's approach in
Frames of Mind, each of these chapters begins with a section that
connects a particular intelligence to literacy through research in the brain
sciences, developmental psychology, evolutionary studies, biographies of
creative individuals, cognitive psychology, and other fields. The larger part
of each chapter, however, is devoted to practical strategies that exploit the
resources of that particular intelligence for teaching reading and writing
skills to children or adults. There is no attempt to pit one approach over another“to
claim, for example, that a phonics approach is better than a whole-word method
or a whole-language approach. In fact, phonetic strategies will be covered in each
chapter, because each of the eight intelligences provides different ways of
helping learners acquire the all-important knowledge of sound-symbol
relationships. The structure of the applied section of each chapter moves from
micro to macro in its coverage of practical strategies. Beginning with letters
and sounds, we then move on to whole words, then whole sentences,
then to bodies of text, then to selecting appropriate books and other
literacy materials that integrate linguistic text with the intelligence of
that chapter, and finally conclude with the broader treatment of general literacy
styles that might be associated with each of the eight intelligences. Many
of the activities and ideas associated with a wide range of approaches to
teaching reading and writing, and to specific literacy programs are also cited
in each chapter.
The emphasis here is to be inclusive and to not waste time on which system
or method or program is best, but rather to see the best aspects of each way of
teaching reading and writing“and to understand why certain methods work best
with certain students and not with others. The theory of multiple intelligences
and its neurological underpinnings, I believe, reveal the power of certain
literacy strategies to work miracles with those individuals who have previously
been thought to have intractable difficulties when it came to learning to read
or write (and where various labels such as “dyslexic,“ “learning disabled,“ and
“reading disordered“ have been used to explain away their supposed incapacity
to learn).
It is my hope that this book will be a helpful supplementary resource for
educators seeking to expand their repertoire of strategies for engaging
students in reading and writing, whether they be regular classroom teachers,
learning disability specialists, speech and language pathologists, reading
teachers, Title I personnel, bilingual or ESOL educators, private tutors,
literacy volunteers, parents, or anyone else interested in helping others
experience the satisfactions of literacy. My special wish is that this book
will serve as a doorway for educators who are seeking to reach students who
have had difficulty with traditional methods of learning to read and write. If
this book helps just a few students learn to read and write who otherwise might
have been frustrated in their attempts, or makes the journey toward literacy
come alive for students who might otherwise have considered it drudgery, I will
have accomplished my goal, which is to share my own deep love of literacy with
others.
Chapter 1. Literacy, Multiple Intelligences, and the Brain
Most of us are familiar with the story of the Blind Men and
the Elephant, a tale that comes to us from ancient India. In this story, a king
presented an elephant to a number of blind men in his community and asked each
to say what he thought it was. The first man touched the side of the beast and
answered, “A wall.“ The second walked up and felt a leg, and replied, “No, this
is a pillar.“ A third man encountered the tail and cried out, “This is certainly
not a wall nor a pillar! It's a rope!“ A fourth man latched on to an ear and
exclaimed: “You're all wrong! It's a piece of cloth!“ And the men began arguing
and fighting among themselves about who was really right.
Recently, I discovered another related story that isn't
nearly as well known. It's entitled “The Blind Educators and the Literacy
Lion.“ In this story (which has rather fuzzier origins), a king asks several
blind educators in his village to examine a new beast that has come into his
possession and to tell him all about it. The first educator goes up to touch
the Literacy Lion, and then runs back to the king shouting: “This beast is made
up of whole words! Yes, all sorts of words, like the and captain
and sure and poultry and wizard and tens of thousands
more!“ Then the king signaled for the second educator to go up to the Literacy
Lion, which she did, and after some time she returned to the king saying: “This
animal isn't made of whole words! It's made up of sounds! All kinds of sounds!
Sounds like ‘thhhh’ and ‘buh’ and ‘ahhhhh’ and ‘ayyyyy’ and ‘juh’ and many
more. In fact, I counted all the sounds, and there are exactly 44!“ A third
educator was sent to examine the beast, and he returned and exclaimed: “This
creature isn't made up of sounds or whole words. It's constructed out of
stories, and fables, and songs, and chants, and poems, and storybooks, and Big
Books, and board books, and novels, and plays, and whole libraries full of
living, exciting tales, and lots more besides!“ Finally, a fourth educator was
sent, and she came back saying: “They're all wrong! This beast is made up of
whole cultures, and people crying out for freedom and power, and it's about
understanding who we are and what we're capable of, and how each of us can
speak, and read, and write with our own voices, and in this way contribute to
the good of all.“ And with this final assessment, the educators proceeded to
dispute heatedly among themselves.
By now, you will have probably recognized that this story is
a thinly disguised attempt to describe the history of literacy acquisition and
the teaching of reading and writing over the past several decades in the United
States and elsewhere. Beginning in 1955, with the publication of Rudolf
Flesch's best-selling book Why Johnny Can't Read(Flesch, 1986), a series
of disputes erupted in educational circles regarding the best way to teach
literacy. This controversy is sometimes referred to as “The Reading Wars.“ In
this dispute, each combatant claims that his or her particular approach,
whether it be phonics, basal readers, whole language, critical literacy, or any
of a number of other methods, represents the single best way to teach reading,
writing, or both to our students. A lot of ink has been spilled in the course
of this battle, and despite rounds and rounds of negotiations, the war
continues to this day.
I think it's time to put an end to these reading wars. The
Literacy Lion is a powerful, complex, and mysterious beast. Each description
that we receive of it“from educators, psychologists, brain researchers, and
other professionals“can only enrich our knowledge of what this powerful being
is really made of, and why we want so much for our students to have contact
with it. In this book, I would like to attempt an integration of the diverse
range of perspectives on reading and writing“a sort of peace conference on
literacy“so that we might forge ahead as educators united, rather than divided,
on this important educational issue. In synthesizing many of the ideas,
programs, methods, brain research studies, and other contributions to literacy
acquisition, I use Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI
theory) as an organizing framework. I want to make it clear from the outset
that I do not propose that multiple intelligences now be considered thebest
approach to literacy acquisition. I do not wish to become a new combatant in
the reading wars. Rather, I want to use MI theory as a tool to help make
sense of the many different approaches to reading and writing that are out there,
showing how these different methods complement rather than contradict each
other. I wish to employ MI theory, then, as a metacognitive strategy for
organizing and making sense of the research findings, programs, and strategies
that are already out there and being used in the teaching of reading and
writing. As we will see, there is a place for each of the many perspectives
that have been offered over the past half-century regarding the best way to
help students“from early childhood to late adulthood“acquire the skills of
literacy.
Because I am using
multiple intelligences as the unifying element in this peace conference on
literacy, I would like to provide a short introduction for the reader who may
be unacquainted with the theory. Those who wish to explore the theory in more
depth may refer to a number of other resources: Armstrong, 1999a, 2000a, 2000b;
Campbell, Campbell, & Dickinson, 1995; Gardner, 1983, 1993, 1999; Hoerr,
2000; Lazear, 1999; Nelson, 1998. The theory of multiple intelligences was
developed by Harvard professor Howard Gardner in the early 1980s (Gardner,
1983). Gardner argues that traditional ideas about intelligence employed in
educational and psychological circles for almost a hundred years require
significant reform. In particular, he suggests that the concept of a “pure“
intelligence that can be measured by a single IQ score is seriously flawed.
Instead, Gardner points out that intelligence isn't a singular phenomenon, but
rather a plurality of capacities. Drawing on his own observations and those of
other scholars from several different disciplines, including anthropology,
developmental psychology, animal physiology, brain research, cognitive science,
and biographies of exceptional individuals, Gardner concluded that there were
at least seven different types of intelligences that everyone seems to possess
to a greater or lesser degree. As the theory evolved, he added an eighth
intelligence to this list (Gardner, 1993). Each intelligence represents a set
of capacities that are brought to bear upon two major focuses: the solving of
problems, and the fashioning of significant cultural products. These eight
intelligences are
Of primary
importance in the construction of MI theory is Gardner's use of a set of eight
criteria that need to be met in order for each intelligence to qualify for
inclusion on his list (Gardner, 1983). What makes MI theory stand out from a
number of other theories of learning and intelligence is the existence of this
set of criteria, and the fact that it encompasses a widely diverse range of
disciplines“all pointing to the relative autonomy of these eight intelligences.
The criteria are
This last criterion
showing how the eight intelligences correspond to different areas of the brain
is of particular importance for us as we next look at the experience of reading
and writing, and how these activities are mediated by neurological events in
the brain.
It seems clear from
the above survey of the eight intelligences that reading and writing are linguistic
activities. The particular symbols used in reading and writing“in this case,
the 26 letters of the English alphabet“are limited to this one intelligence. In
addition, we tend to associate the activities of poets, playwrights, novelists,
hyperlexic savants, and bookworms almost exclusively with linguistic
intelligence. Certain distinctive brain structures, particularly in the left
hemisphere for most people, are particularly important when it comes to the
processing of the phonological, semantic, and syntactic aspects of words. In
sum, there are strong reasons for literacy to be regarded as part and parcel of
linguistic intelligence. Having said this, however, I'd like to argue that when
we look at how the brain processes the actual experience of reading and
writing, we can begin to see how all of the eight intelligences have
important parts to play.
To illustrate, let's
examine what happens in the brain during the simple act of speaking a printed
word (see Figure 1.1). First the human eye must see the word on the page. This
sensation is first registered by the primary visual area in the occipital lobe
(the seat of spatial intelligence). After the word is seen in the primary
visual area, it is then relayed to the angular gyrus (a “gyrus“ is the crest of
a single convolution in the neocortex), at the junction of the temporal,
parietal, and occipital lobes of the brain. I like to think of the angular
gyrus as the region of the brain that most reflects the idea of multiple
intelligences' relationship to literacy because it is here, at the crossroads
of three different lobes, that many different types of information are brought
together or associated with each other in creating linguistic information,
including visual-spatial configurations, musical and oral sounds, and even
physical sensations. Recent research has suggested that individuals who have
difficulty reading and writing often have significant disruption in this
particular area of the brain (Horwitz, Rumsey, & Donohue, 1998). In the
nearby region of Wernicke's area all of this information is synthesized in such
a way that it can be understood in a meaningful way (i.e., semantically
encoded). From there, it is transmitted via a bundle of nerve fibers called the
arcuate fasciculus to Broca's area in the lower left frontal lobe, where
it is logically encoded in a grammatical system, and a program is prepared to
evoke articulation, and then supplied to the motor cortex, which in turn drives
the muscles of the lips, tongue, and larynx to speak the actual word
(Geschwind, 1979). Here then we see the involvement of several intelligences,
including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic, in
this simple act of speaking a printed word.
While the above
scenario took place in the left hemisphere of the brain, there is
increasing evidence that reading and writing involve significant use of the right
hemisphere as well. Studies suggest, for example, that the right hemisphere is
activated when subjects read words that are anxiety-provoking or emotionally
charged (Van Strien, Stolk, & Zuiker, 1995). The right hemisphere also
appears to be involved in semantic decisions during the reading and writing
process, especially when the reader is in the initial stages of deciding among
a range of possible words (Coney & Evans, 2000). In addition, the right
hemisphere appears to take information that has been initially processed by the
left hemisphere and uses it in the course of comprehending text (Coney, 1998).
There are also subcortical structures involved in the process of reading,
including the cerebellum, which has been previously linked to bodily-kinesthetic
functions, and also areas of the limbic system that become activated while
experiencing emotions during the process of reading (Fulbright et al., 1999;
Simpson, Snyder, Gusnard, & Raichle, 2001). Unfortunately, we are still in
the infancy of brain scan research regarding reading and writing activities,
and too many studies are still based on a very limited context of literacy“for
example, reading single words in an artificial laboratory setting rather than
reading whole texts in a natural home or school setting (for recent criticisms
of brain scan research and literacy, see Coles, 1998, 2000; Ferguson, 2002).
However, some of
these newer brain studies (which will be reviewed in greater detail throughout
the book) accord well with our understanding of the actual experiences involved
in reading and writing. The person who reads and writes is doing far more than
simply linguistically encoding data. She is also looking at the visual
configuration of the letters. Thus, spatial intelligence“the
intelligence of pictures and images“must first be brought to bear on the
printed letters. Then she must match these visual images with sounds. In doing
this, she must draw upon her wealth of knowledge concerning musical sounds (musical
intelligence), nature sounds (naturalist intelligence), and the
sounds of words (linguistic intelligence) in order to make the proper
letter-sound correspondences. In addition, she brings in information from her
body (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence) to ground these visual and
auditory sensations into a structure of meaning. As we will see in Chapter 2,
the physical body is integral to processing the shapes of letters and the
meaning of words and text. Once she begins to organize the information into
grammatical units, she draws upon deep intuitive syntactic structures that
employ logical-mathematical transformations (see Chapter 5 for more
information about this process). As she reads meaningful information, she may
visualize what she reads (spatial intelligence), experience herself
actively engaged in a physical way in the text (bodily-kinesthetic
intelligence), have emotional reactions to the material (intrapersonal
intelligence), attempt to guess what the author or characters intend or
believe (interpersonal intelligence), and think critically and logically
about what she is reading (logical-mathematical intelligence). She may
decide to take action as a result of her reading and writing, either in a
physical way (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence) or perhaps within some
larger social context (interpersonal intelligence). In each of these
cases, our reader is bringing to bear different intelligences upon the
multilayered processes of reading and writing.
When we begin to
think of literacy as involving all of the intelligences it becomes
easier to understand the variety of ways in which literacy itself is learned
and practiced. We know from the literature on individuals who have difficulty
reading and writing that their difficulties are not all the same. Some students
have particular problems with the visual configurations of letters (sometimes
this is referred to as dyseidetic dyslexia), while others encounter
difficulties primarily with the sounds of language (dysphonetic dyslexia).
Other students can decode individual words but encounter obstacles in
comprehending whole text. Some individuals have problems primarily with the
underlying grammatical-logical structures of sentences. Others have
difficulties visualizing what they have read, or understanding what the
author's intent may be.
By the same token,
people actually learn to read in many different ways. For decades, many people
learned to read with the old “look-say“ Dick and Jane method. But it
took a writer like Rudolf Flesch to point out that many students were being
left out of this approach. As he indicated, some students need to learn to read
by mastering the sounds or phonemes of language and their correspondences to
the visual letters. Other students, however, have had difficulty with a
decontextualized phonetic approach to reading and seem to do better with a
method that emphasized real literature and natural contexts for reading and
writing. Still other students thrive when other features are included in a
reading and writing program, for example, involvement of the body, the use of
the hands, a focus on color, an emphasis on the unique social milieu of the
learner, the insertion of a particular component of great interest to the
student such as animals, sports, or superheroes, or factors related to a
student's individual learning style (see for example, Carbo, Dunn, & Dunn,
1986). As MIT linguist Steven Pinker points out, “it would not be surprising if
language subcenters are idiosyncratically tangled or scattered over the cortex“
(Pinker, 1994, p. 315). Such wide variations among learners suggest that
instead of pitting one literacy method against another we need to discover how
a student's unique brain is wired for reading and writing and then use a range
of approaches that matches his or her “literacy style.“ It is for such a
purpose that this book has been written.
While I will cite
many studies that have focused on the breakdown of the capacity to read or
write in individuals who have been described as “dyslexic,“ “learning
disabled,“ or “reading disabled,“ the overall emphasis of the book is not on
what's “wrong,“ but rather what's rightwith a student's reading and
writing capacities. In fact, when I use labels such as “LD,“ “ADHD,“ and the
like, I generally put them in quotation marks or otherwise qualify them,
because of my belief that they are labels externally imposed within a specific
social milieu (for more information, see Armstrong, 1997, 2000a).
Several years ago, a
study on reading published in the New England Journal of Medicine
received significant national attention by suggesting that individuals
described as dyslexic were not part of a special species of learner separate
from normal readers, but rather, that they represented the low end of a
continuum of reading ability found in the rest of the population (Shaywitz, et
al., 1992). I'd like to suggest that this continuum stretches from the
nonreader all the way up to Shakespeare, and that every one of us falls
somewhere along this spectrum. Instead of taking a “half-empty glass“
perspective in thinking that everybody has a certain amount of reading
disability in them, I prefer to take the “half-full glass“ point of view in
suggesting that even the student who has just written her first words is
already on the road to writing like Shakespeare. And the fact is, there are
multiple pathways to the highest peaks of literacy as we will see in the next
eight chapters of this book. The biggest issue for educators to resolve
regarding the Literacy Lion shouldn't be whether whole language or phonics is
the best way to teach reading, or whether to focus on punctuation or creativity
in writing, or whether we should teach students spelling skills or let them
invent their own words. The biggest question is whether we as educators are
going to teach literacy skills in such a way that the words lie dead there on
the page for so many students, or, conversely, whether we're going to take
positive steps toward the ultimate goal of making the words come alive for
all students. I invite you to choose the second option, and, for the rest
of this book join me in an adventure through the multiple intelligences of
reading and writing.
Chapter 2. Coming to Grips with the Musculature of Words
Words have power, they have muscle. Think of the
toddler who has discovered a new word: “up!“ That word has an almost magical
quality for the child, because by merely saying it she can accomplish all sorts
of physical actions. She can get mommy to come and pick her up and set her in a
chair for a delicious dinner, she can be swooped up and given a big hug from
daddy, or she can be put on big brother's shoulders and taken on a grand tour
of the neighborhood. Never in a million years could she accomplish these things
through her own meager physical efforts. But a single word does the trick.
“Up!“ has muscle.
Words have deep connections to the human musculature.
Scientists believe that language emerged, at least in part, from the physical
movements of primates and early humans: their gestures, facial expressions,
postures, and other gross and subtle motor actions (see, for example, Varney,
2002). Interestingly, area F5 of the brain of monkeys, which is associated with
the making of intentional physical movements, is considered analogous to
Broca's area, one of the most important linguistic brain structures in human
beings (Motluk, 2001). In ways that are still too little understood, certain
motor movements that functioned as communicative signs between humans over time
became increasingly specialized in the vocal cords and other speech-producing
areas of the body and brain. As one researcher noted: “The origin and evolution
of language was the result of a transfer of motor patterning from that
controlling bodily movement generally to the articulatory organs“ (Allott,
2000). Another expert was even more blunt: “Linguistic structure may emerge
from, and may even be viewed as, a special case of motoric structure, the
structure of action“ (Studdert-Kennedy, 1983). Similarly, our ability to internally
operate on words and syntax as mental thought may have emerged from our
capacity to manipulate physical objects. As San Francisco neurologist Frank
Wilson writes: “Words that were originally object attributes come increasingly
to be manipulated and combined, just as real objects are manipulated and
combined by the child“ (Wilson, 1998, p. 193).
There is growing evidence from brain research pointing to a
strong neurological basis for this link between physical movement and language
and literacy. Neuroscientists, of course, have known for quite a while that the
motor cortex is an important part of the language process, being responsible
for the movement of the muscles of the tongue, mouth, and throat in order to
produce audible speech sounds (Geschwind, 1979). However, more recently, with
the emergence of neuroimaging technologies and new genetic techniques, there
has been increasing evidence that language and literacy are also linked to
other areas of the brain that have traditionally been seen as the locus of
bodily-kinesthetic capacities. A study published in the medical journal Nature
described the discovery of a specific gene tied to a particular set of language
disorders; this gene is involved in the development of the basal ganglia, a set
of brain structures that are crucial for regulating motor movements (Wade,
2001). In addition, over the past few years, researchers have been focusing on
the cerebellum, that “ancient brain“ at the base of the skull responsible for
coordinating complex physical movements in three-dimensional space, as an
important contributor to language capacity. This influence may extend beyond
oral language to reading skills. Recently, NASA scientists have noted that
astronauts who had experienced prolonged periods of weightlessness in
space“creating disturbances of the cerebellum“sometimes suffered from mild
dyslexia on returning to earth conditions (Meikle, 2001). A recent neuroimaging
study using functional MRI supported this cerebellum-reading link in its
findings of cerebellar activation while subjects engaged in several reading
tasks that required orthographic, phonologic, and semantic skills (Fulbright,
et al., 1999; see also, Nicolson & Fawcett, 1999).
Further evidence for the connection of literacy to the
physical body can be seen by examining the development of language
historically, and in particular, the history of the English language. The
Middle English word for “remorse“ was originally “agonbite,“ an acutely
kinesthetic way of rendering the sense of guilt (literally, “agony biting one's
insides“). Shakespeare's works are filled with kinesthetic images and
expressions. For example, when Macbeth is trying to decide whether or not to
kill Duncan, the king of Scotland, he says: “I have no spur to prick the sides
of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself and falls on
th'other side“ (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7). Today's language is not nearly
so rich with bodily sensations and movements, but if we engage in a bit of
lexical archeology, we can see in many highly abstract words the origins of
physical activity. The word “error“ for example, goes back to the Latin for “to
wander“ (it's related to the French word “errant“). The word “person“ goes back
to the Latin word “persona,“ meaning mask, performer, or actor. Even the word
“process“ is based upon a Latin word meaning “to proceed.“
We can also see how literacy emerged from the body by
examining the development of print historically. Before the invention of the
printing press in the 15th century, all manuscripts were written down by
hand. That meant that the process of reading was intimately intertwined
with the intensive manual labor of calligraphy. Medieval students sat at their
places in medieval universities and laboriously transcribed their teachers'
lectures (the word lecture comes from the Latin word legere, “to read“).
The act of reading itself often involved touching the words as one read,
speaking the words out loud, and putting one's whole physical and mental energy
into the work of understanding and comprehending. Clerical scholar Dom Jean
LeClercq observed: “When legere and lectio [to read] are used
without further explanation, they mean an activity which, like chant and
writing, requires the participation of the whole body and the whole mind.
Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a
physical exercise on an equal level with walking, running or ball-playing“
(McLuan, 1965, p. 89). Marshall McLuan refers to the pre-Gutenberg manuscripts
of medieval and classic times as “highly textural and tactile.“ Note the
relationship between the linguistic word “text“ and the kinesthetic word
“texture“; the word “Textura“ was actually a name used for Gothic lettering
(McLuan, 1965, p. 83).
Another way to understand the bodily-kinesthetic foundations
of literacy is by inquiring into the inner worlds of those individuals who
excel in the realm of the printed word“in other words, writers. More than a few
of them reveal idiosyncratic ways in which hands-on and physical sensations
play a major part in their creative process. The philosopher and psychologist
William James explained his own method of letter recall as a tactile
experience: “I myself am a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom
call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I
must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that
the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all“ (James, 1910, p. 61). The
British writer A. E. Housman explained his own process in writing poetry quite
literally as getting the goosebumps: “Experience has taught me, when I am
shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of
poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is
another which consists in a constriction of the throat, and a precipitation of
water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing
a phrase from one of Keats's last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny
Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’ The
seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach“ (Ghiselin, 1960, p. 90).
I should add here, parenthetically, that my own work as a
writer bears out the kinesthetic experience: I know that I am writing at or
near my best when I get a particular sensation deep in my belly. I also have a
peculiar sense of the text that appears on the computer screen as I write, as a
thicket of words with a definite textural feeling: the better the text, the
thicker the feeling; the more superficial the text, the thinner the physical
sensation that I have in my body. Finally, let me include the childhood
reminiscence of the great American writer Eudora Welty: “At around age six,
perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at
that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and
the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on
light. There comes a moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to
round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word ‘moon’ came into
my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon“ (Angell, 2001). For young
children, words have a physical reality. In their eyes, the word “hit“ can
actually hurt someone (Piaget, 1975).
This last experience brings us back to the importance that
the body has in the first literacy experiences of young children. When we
observe pre-literacy or emerging literacy in early childhood, we see it
expressed in large motor movements: the child who is busy “reading“ a book will
often make a big show of turning the pages, opening the mouth wide to speak,
moving the head back and forth, and rocking back and forth. For the emergent
reader, reading is not the quiet passive experience of sitting stone cold still
in a chair with eyes fixed rigidly on a page. Reading is a physical
performance! Emergent writing is often even more physical, with the
young child sometimes using the writing implement quite literally as a “tool“
to dig meaning into the surface of the page. In the emerging literate
scrawlings of the young child, the boundaries between etching, sculpting,
drawing, and writing seem to disappear, as they also did in a highly refined
and articulated way in the creative work of William Blake (Bentley, 2001).
The above material from brain research, the history of the
English language, early childhood development, and the creative process of
writers suggests that literacy programs need to address in some significant way
the role that the physical body has in reading and writing. What follows are
suggestions for how the fuller integration of the body into a comprehensive
literacy program might proceed.
Recent research in
the gestural equivalence of language has attempted to create direct
correspondences between specific phonemes and discrete gestures (Allott, 2000).
Along these lines, existing educational programs have made efforts to link
letters or sounds with particular body movements, including educational
eurythmy (Steiner, 1983) and Zoo-phonics (Atterman, 1997), or have linked the
physical act of producing specific lip, mouth, and tongue patterns with
individual phonemes. See, for example, the Lindamood-Bell program (Howard,
1982). Although there are obvious and significant differences in the way these
programs work, at a deeper level they share the belief that providing a motoric
equivalent to a letter shape or a speech sound will give the beginning reader a
much better chance of remembering sound-symbol relationships. As such, any
educator can create a “physical phonics“ program, simply by taking the roughly
44 phonemes in the English language and developing a unique gesture, posture,
or physical movement for each one. For example, the long e sound might
be represented as the hands moving away from each other as if pulling taffy,
while the long o sound might involve bringing the extended arms upwards
above the head in a rounded fashion as if creating a large circle. If every
beginning reader were taught 44 separate physical actions that corresponded to
the 44 phonemes, they could then draw upon this motor memory bank in helping to
recall the specific sound-symbol pattern that each movement represents. In
fact, it might be preferred that the teacher use her own creativity to come up
with these movements, or draw upon the innovation of the learners themselves to
generate this kinesthetic vocabulary.
Similarly, for help
in learning the visual patterns of letters, educators since Montessori have
used physical and tactile methods, especially in the field of special education
(e.g., Fernald, 1988). Examples of this type of approach include
There really is no end to developing innovative ways for the
visual shapes of letters to be tied to their physical “feel.“ One teacher, for
example, put letter shapes in waterproof tape on the bottom of a swimming pool
and asked a student who had significant difficulty learning the alphabet to swim
the letter shapes. I have often thought that if every schoolyard had a
playground that included 26 giant alphabet sculptures for kids to climb on and
crawl under and around and through, there would be no need to teach the
alphabet at all inside the classroom.
Educators can also
use many of the above techniques as the beginning reader starts to put letters
together into meaningful combinations, or words. And I employ the active voice
here intentionally, because the student should be actively involved in
constructing these meaningful units of letters. Here are some other ways they
can do this:
Similarly, in
learning the spelling patterns of words, there are a number of
activities that actively use manipulatives or creative body movements in
remembering specific word orders or consonant-vowel patterns (Barsch, 1974).
For example:
While actively
engaged in physically creating words, students should also be expressing their meanings
as well. The simplest and most direct way of doing this is by acting out the word
in some way. The old parlor game “charades“ is probably the best example of an
activity that promotes kinesthetic expression of word meanings. Students who
have a special dramatic flair, yet who do poorly with traditional reading
approaches, are most likely to benefit from this type of approach, yet all kids
will have fun learning sight words, or vocabulary words, by pantomiming or
dramatizing them. I've talked with high school educators who have had students
photograph some of the best examples of these dramatized word meanings. For
example, one student illustrated the meaning of the word “abashed“ with a
picture of a student with his trousers pulled down to his knees, revealing only
his multi-colored boxer shorts! These word meanings can also be acted out and
then videotaped. How refreshing to have this week's list of sight words or
vocabulary words presented as a film of dramatic scenes, rather than a boring
list of definitions in a workbook.
I believe that it
was Maria Montessori's teachings that first suggested to me the importance of
linking reading directly to action. Too often, beginning reading students read
simple sentences out loud, and then just leave them there dead on the page in
an unfulfilled state. Montessori's great innovation was to have students read a
sentence on a slip of paper and then carry out the activity or action that it
represented. Montessori was, of course, an exceedingly practical educator, and
so it made sense for her to include sentences that involved specific useful
tasks such as “Water the plants at the back of the room,“ or “Pick up the book
that has fallen on the floor.“ Students might actually enjoy the process of
composing their own practical sentences. This kind of activity tells them, from
the very beginning of their experience with literacy, that words have the power
of action.
I want to highlight
the point that students should be actively writingthe sentences that
they read. If you want to think of it in this way, writing is actually just
a highly kinesthetic way of reading, and so you might want to consider it
as an excellent strategy for helping the beginning reader master the code.
Remember what I said at the beginning of this chapter about the historical
origins of literacy: before the printing press, all reading material had to be
written down by hand. So when the first meaningful sentences that a student
learns to read are those he has inscribed himself with his own hand, there is a
direct physical connection to the words and their meaning from the very
beginning. Here are some other ways to get physically involved in the
composition of simple sentences:
A few years back I
was addressing the National Family Literacy Association at a convention in
Louisville, Kentucky, and they had just had a celebration the night before
where tens of thousands of pieces of confetti, each one inscribed with a word,
had been released and still lay on the floor waiting to be picked up the
morning after. I whimsically suggested to the group that they might consider
trying to reconstruct the novel Gone with the Wind from the scattered
pieces. Once we begin working with blocks of text, even texts much shorter than
Margaret Mitchell's novel, it becomes harder and more time consuming to use
many of the technique listed in the previous section. However, I should point
out that if a student is working with short paragraphs, it's still possible to
use manipulatives to put the text together, or even to inscribe the paragraph
in chalk on a large surface of pavement, and then have the students walk
the paragraph as they read it. In fact, it would be wonderful to have in each
school in the country a dedicated space where a large body of text (perhaps a
famous poem, or a selection from an inspirational speech, or a passage from a
descriptive short story) is colorfully and texturally inscribed on the floor,
so that students could regularly take time to physically stroll across the text
while reading it. (Perhaps such a text could be changed regularly, so that new
reading material would always be available for students to walk, crawl, or run
across.)
Beyond such
whimsical and somewhat extraordinary suggestions for putting the “texture“ back
into “text,“ the greater part of the bodily-kinesthetic focus on text should be
on helping students explore, understand, and express the text's meaning in
physical ways. I've often suggested to educators that if, after reading a
story, teachers would simply have students quickly role-play the material that
they have just read, reading comprehension levels would increase rapidly for
many students, particularly for many of those students who have been labeled as
having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or learning disabilities
(Armstrong, 1997, 1999b, 2000b). There are many ways to work with specific
reading comprehension skills through drama, role-play, or pantomime. For
example, students might be asked to give the main idea of a passage by
providing a “freeze frame“ montage (students assemble themselves in a way that
captures the theme), which can then be photographed or videotaped and compared
with other groups' physical conceptions of the main idea. Or, on an individual
basis, a student might be given a lump of clay, some art supplies, or other
plastic materials, and asked to express the main idea through a
three-dimensional construction. To help students understand character
development in a story, they might be invited to work out a pantomime that
expresses the stages a particular character goes through in facing the
challenges or conflicts of the story. What we're asking students to do is think
through material in the text through their bodies, instead of simply
requiring them to sit still at their desks and do all the thinking invisibly.
A particularly
effective way to engage students is by having them read the material and act it
out simultaneously. Plays are, of course, the best medium for doing
this. I remember attending a high school Shakespeare class at an international
school in England where the students were standing in the classroom, each with
a play in hand, reading and interacting with each other, while the teacher went
around to each “reader/actor“ helping them get into the physical feeling of
their character. At one point, the teacher encouraged a student to actually slap
the script of another student in order to embody the enmity felt by the one
character toward the other. Little physical cues like this can have an immense
impact upon a student's involvement in a text.
I should point out,
however, that an educator can still help students comprehend text using
bodily-kinesthetic intelligence without ever even having students leave their
desks. This can be accomplished by asking students to explore the meanings of
text through their own internal kinesthetic imagery. Kinesthetic imagery refers
to inner imagery that represents physical movement, bodily sensations, and
tactile impressions (Houston, 1982). A few preliminary exercises can prepare
students to understand this form of imagery: have them imagine walking down a
road that's been freshly paved with tar (and feeling the imaginary stickiness
on their imaginary feet), or basking in the sun (and feeling the imaginary
warmth on their imaginary skin), or lifting a heavy weight (and feeling the
strain in their imaginary muscles). Tell them that in addition to having a
physical body, they also have an imaginary kinesthetic body. Have them raise
their actual left arm in the air and put it down again. Then, have them raise
and lower their “kinesthetic arm“ (their imaginary left arm) without putting
their real physical arm in the air. These kinds of exercises prepare them to
understand what is meant by kinesthetic imagery. Then, after reading a text,
have the students experience the action of the text (if it is a narrative) by
closing their eyes and imagining themselves in the story. If a character in the
story is swimming, have the students imagine themselves swimming,
focusing on the sensations they have in their bodies, on their skin, and so on.
If a character has just eaten an ice cream cone, have the students feel the
coldness on their lips and in their throat, and the sweetness and taste of the
ice cream, and the crunchiness of the cone.
Some students
(especially younger ones) will easily adapt to this kind of approach, and will
even outwardly make the actions of licking the ice cream, smacking their lips,
and so forth. Other students (such as high school level and adult learners) may
have difficulty getting involved in the imagery at first, and may actually need
help in accessing the imagery by doing the action outwardly. For example, if a
character in a story has just yawned, you might have the students actually yawn
themselves as a prompt to identify with the action of the character.
Teachers should
particularly identify text where the author has emphasized the use of
kinesthetic imagery in the choice of words, metaphors, phrases, and narrative
devices. I've already mentioned above how often this occurs in the works of our
greatest English writer, William Shakespeare. Pick up virtually any play at
random, open a page, and you will find a kinesthetic metaphor. For example, in Henry
V, the French Duke of Orleans insults the English army by saying: “Foolish
curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads
crushed like rotten apples“ (Act 3, Scene 7). Or, in Julius Caesar,
Antony comments in the wake of Caesar's assassination: “O pardon me, thou
bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers“ (Act 3,
Scene 1). Even the names Shakespeare uses for his characters are often
kinesthetic, especially his comic figures (for example, in A Midsummer
Night's Dream: Nick Bottom, Tom Snout, Robin Starveling). A more
contemporary example, James Joyce's Ulysses (the work considered by many
critics to be the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century) has an
entire chapter dedicated to the body, where the narrative action mimics the
peristalsis action of the intestines (with many fitful stops and starts). These
works are the touchstones of English language literacy. While few authors reach
this height, educators should always be on the look-out in any text for the
possibility that kinesthetic imagery may be present. And once kinesthetic
imagery has been located in a text, consider accentuating the author's imagery
by having students act out the images in the classroom. For example, when
Hamlet says in his famous “To be, or not to be“ speech, “Whether ‘tis nobler in
the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .“ (Hamlet,
Act 3, Scene 1), students might stand up and briefly act out the gestures
involved in being hit with arrows or stones from a slingshot. Or, in a simpler
story, if an author writes: “He walked as if with a chip on his shoulder,“ a
teacher might give students game chips and ask them to put the chips on their shoulders
and walk around the classroom, and then discuss the meaning of the expression
and its significance in the context of the story.
When selecting books
and other literacy materials for highly bodily-kinesthetic learners, especially
for those who are intimidated by books, it's important to keep in mind that
books can involve much more than words; increasingly, nontraditional books that
combine words with tactile, physical, or kinesthetic possibilities are being
published. I'd like to highlight two publishers in particular, Klutz Press, 455
Portage Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94306, 650-857-0888, klutz-press@aol.com or http://www.klutz.com, and Workman Publishing
Company, 708 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-9555, 212-254-5900, info@workman.com. Many of the books sold by
these two publishers include attached materials that involve bodily movement or
hands-on exploration. For example, a book on juggling is packaged with juggling
balls, a book on jump rope rhymes includes a jump rope, and a book on creating
with clay comes packaged with the actual clay. These books are exciting because
they exemplify a direct relationship between reading and doing. By
actively exploring the materials, students become interested in what's inside
the book, which leads to more informed use of the materials in a positive cycle
of mutual reinforcement.
Other publishers
have gone even further by creating books that actually come apart and can be
reconstructed into something useful or instructive“for example, creating a
working clock or a medieval castle from the materials of the book. For very
young children, touch-and-feel books provide an immediate tactile experience
along with the words, and scratch-and-sniff books give tactile and olfactory
stimulation. For upper elementary to adult learners, any how-to book, even if
devoid of hands-on features, nevertheless promotes active exploration and
should be considered part of any bodily-kinesthetic library. Also, look at
selecting books for their tactile and physical qualities. Some books consist of
paper with a rougher or smoother “feel“ than average, or have more deeply
inscribed print that readers can touch as they read along. Other books, in
their largeness or smallness, or unusual shape, make reading and manipulating
the book a unique physical event. Finally, the ultimate kinesthetic experience
is to engage students in making their own books from scratch, including making
the paper, the ink, and the bindings, and then doing their own calligraphy on
the pages.
Back in the 1970s,
when I was just starting out in teaching, I became familiar with a literacy
program called Modern Reading that was being used with so-called “at
risk“ boys who today we would label ADHD and perhaps also conduct disordered
(von Hilshiemer, 1970). What interested me about this program was that it was
based on teaching reading in a fast-paced style (individual reading sessions
with the instructor lasted only a minute or two) and it let the students chew
gum while reading comics independently in groups lying on the floor among soft
pillows. Now, as I look back on this long-defunct program, I realize that it
was a product of the '60s counterculture and is not likely to be replicated
soon in any of today's school systems. And yet, I see in this program something
admirable, and that is its recognition of the need to match literacy
acquisition with the tempo and style of the students. It was a hyperactive
program for hyperactive students! This realization suggests something more
fundamental to me, and that is that we need to consider the broader “literacy
styles“ of students in helping them learn to read and write. And it seems to me
that the traditional image we have of literacy acquisition“that of a student
sitting at a desk quietly turning pages or writing with a pen or pencil“does
not really work for the highly bodily-kinesthetic student. Instead, we need to
consider ways in which we can, as educators, reconceptualize the processes of
reading and writing to consider the needs of students who are movers, builders,
touchers, and squirmers. What this means, in part, is that we need to discard
the traditional image of the silent, motionless reader or writer and envision
other, more tactile and mobile ways in which literacy can be achieved and
practiced. Here are some suggestions:
I hope that the
suggestions provided in this chapter will spur further research and application
of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to literacy issues. Here are some
suggestions for getting started right away: