HOLSITIC KNOWING ~ visual spatial intelligence

DO YOU THINK IN IMAGES?

Consider Dreaming ... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/dreams/
 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/dreams/ask.html 
"... dreaming also is looking for new ways to connect these associative networks ..." Stickgold
Whole thinking, Holistic meaning making ...
it may seem like a leap from dreaming into school, but there is a link.

Why do very intelligent students sometimes fail in school? Could it be that our educational system is geared toward those with stronger left brain hemispheres, leaving the big picture thinkers out of luck? Psychologist Linda Silverman describes for host Karen Saupe these and other claims found in her book Upside-Down Brilliance: the Visual-Spatial Learner 2002

http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/307200

Traditionally, schooling has focused on two dominant

learning styles – Linguistic and Logical/Mathematical.

However, research led by Gardner since the early

1980’s, has exposed the limits of this old paradigm.

Gardner’s theory has opened up for scrutiny the many

ways people engage with and learn from the world

around them that extends beyond this narrow

configuration.


Thinking in images is a powerful tool - 1/3 of the population thinks in images.
Images are whole messages, they contain meaning and they make meaning.

Most school subjects are geared to 'instruct' PART to WHOLE - a way of thinking about learning that negates the experiences of about 1/3 of students, according to Silverman.

Blooms Taxonomy tells us there is a heirachy - or sequence to learning, but this isn't necessarily so for visual spatial learners, at least not in the sense intended by his model. 'Sequential' can be interpreted quite differently and unrelated to the structure of delivery. 
This diagram from the Queensland Visual Art Senior Syllabus re Inquiry Learning Model is an excellent 'map' of the creative process:

Our world is increasingly visual spatial in orientation. Video games? hardware? software? And our ways for engaging in the process of education need to take this into consideration if they are to be relevant to the present - future.

Ask yourself; who reads/needs instructions? Consider the frustration of being forced through these hoops to get to something you understood at the beginning.

It's a fallacy that girls aren't visual spatial - my theory ... we all have the capacity span the spectrum of learning styles. In our current education system we must be cognisant of the fact that at least some girls will torture themselves to comply with logical/sequential delivery - they go through the motions. What happens if we imagine it the other way around? Creativity opens the process, Critical Thinking comes after NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

 

Everyone is unique - the trick is in empowering the student to identify their own, most effective and motivating way of working/learning. 

BLOOMS Revised Taxonomy adds create to the top of the heirachy ...interesting

BLOOM'S REVISED TAXONOMY

WHOLE to PART

One approach to Inquiry Learning ~ Here's the problem ... Here's the tools Figure it out. See it in the minds eye ~ close eyes and picture what is being read 

VISUALISATION

Einstein saw in holes [: )] how do we see wholes? Identify your MI

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm

 

Society is becoming more and more visual/spatial while schools, by-an-large, are not moving with it

Research = 2/3 of population prefer visual/spatial method of instruction

1/4 is auditory / instruction so they feel successful in school

Need some of both modes of instruction? Integrated way is best - using info from both hemispheres.

Everyone needs to have right hemisphere activated otherwise learning doesn't occur. Attention is in the right hemisphere

ART art ART that doing word ... CREATION is essential to activate right hemisphere

Anyone who has had intimate artistic experiences (e.g., as a creator, performer or teacher) would appreciate the special ways in which the processes of thinking, feeling, knowing and communicating take place in the arts (Eisner, 1996)

Artmaking contains within it, processes and gateways to opportunities for seeking and finding both purpose and meaning. 

"This paper (Wright, S. 1998) illustrated examples of children using integrated information processes that bring together thought, emotion and action; thinking through imagery (and sound) and with the body. Yet, synesthesia and the use of metaphor and symbolic expression often can be suppressed in institutionalised education. This is largely due to the social and cultural dominance of literal language and written modes of expression.

"... Consequently, much of the learning, thinking and feeling that occurs in the arts takes place non-verbally. This is because the arts involve unique forms of meaning making, knowing and communicating, through the use of discourses and a range of "texts" that can be "read" and "written".

"Consequently, a multi-modal approach to education should include a liberal definition of the term "Literacy", which encompasses the multiliteracy integration of body, mind and soul through musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic and symbolic forms of artistic expression. Education should encompass a full range of expressive and communicative avenues ..."

Visual Language, and artmaking media provide access to the first layer of the journey, like an onion, they are part of a whole. The multitude of layers aside these tools involve all of Bloom's terms but they are not hierarchical.

SYNASETHESIA 
TOOL or METAPHOR 
 translating the world

smell ~ image

sound ~ movement

touch ~ smell

taste ~ sound

READING COLOURED WORDS

practice ...

"Stroop Effect" is named after J. Ridley Stroop who discovered this strange phenomenon in the 1930s. Here is your job: name the colors of the following words. Do NOT read the words...rather, say the color of the words. For example, if the word "BLUE" is printed in a red color, you should say "RED". Say the colors as fast as you can. It is not as easy as you might think!

interactive ...

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html

try a directional one ... 

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/timestcd.html

and numbers ... 

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/readyn.html

with animals?

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/timesa.html

Tapping into the student. WHAT DOES THE STUDENT DO REALLY WELL? BEGIN THERE and USE IT!

PROCESS + PRODUCT 

In the school curriculum, we need to focus not on one or the other at the exclusion of either.

In language, LEFT hemisphere is the only place that can differentiate phonemes in the auditory sequential - where they are put into little sequences ~ PHONETIC. RIGHT brain knows in wholes - reading whole words that are MEANINGFUL, in units of MEANING. Children can read fluently without any phonetic training.

An example FEELING to VISUAL - EMOTION EXTERNALISED

CREATE then ANALYSE

Providing opportunities for students to learn means that CRITICAL + CREATIVE processes need to be in place

Investigate the IMPORTANCE OF FLOW to activate Right Hemisphere and activate connections.

" The levels of reality are not found in the external world, which is obviously not divided into levels. It is the mind that, through adjusting its levels of perception (from the very close and small to the encompassing vision of a landscape or the immensity of the universe), through its language and thinking habits, makes connections between the elements that it distinguishes, and sees these connections as levels of organization. None of these levels of reality alone is reality itself: reality would be the infinitely complex whole of all the levels co-existing" Danielle Boutet

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10030/Default.aspx#_edn5

"The greater the complexity and demands of the outer world, the more essential are those capacities and qualities of interiority that allow us to be spacious and skilled enough to open the code of information : discernment, values, detachment, presence, imagination, reflection and heart." Hart, T (2007)

NOTES + RESOURCES

Are you visual spatial dominant?

A vision of education in the 21st century

"The beneficial aspects of visual-spatial reasoning will become more prized in this century as technology continues to advance. The main advantages of this way of knowing, as Steve Haas has summarized them, are:

• Perceiving the whole quickly
• Finding patterns easily
  
• Thinking graphically
• Understanding dimensionality
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Silverman, L.  A Special Excerpt from Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner
  
  From Chapter 15, Visual-Spatial Adults and the Future of Education
  
  http://www.visualspatial.org/excerpts.htm
  
  
  Right Hemisphere / Left Hemisphere ... well worth watching
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

http://www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_of_education.htm 
 An excellent article in summary

 Artistically rooted forms of intelligence

1. Experiencing qualitative relationships and making judgements

2. Flexible purposing

3. Form and content is most often inextricable

4. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form

5. Looking to the medium

6. The aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible

Vygotsky, L  Russian Psychologist THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE http://listentogenius.com/recordings4/ThoughtLanguage.mp3

Jung, C. A General Description of Types

http://listentogenius.com/author.php/85 A selection from the essay http://listentogenius.com/recordings/General-Description-Types.mp3 

Piaget, J. A selection from THE LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT OF THE CHILD Download mp3 file: The Language and Thought of the Child

Multiple Intelligence Test - ONLINE

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/choose_lang.cfm 
 

Cognitive style and learning strategies  
http://www.monografias.com/trabajos16/learning-styles/learning-styles.shtml

Learning Styles + Strategies - http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm
     identify your own from the descriptions

ACTIVE + REFLECTIVE

SENSING + INTUITIVE 

VISUAL + VERBAL

SEQUENTIAL + GLOBAL

Video: http://dhtv2.csudh.edu/CTL/021507_HB.wmv 

Blooms Old + New

http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm

J. P. GUILFORD ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Guilford 


Eisner, E W. (1996). Qualitative research in music education: Past, present, perils, promise. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 130 (Fall), 8-16 


Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. NY: Basic Books.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

Hart, T, 2007. Reciprocal Revelation: Toward a Pedagogy of Interiority in Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, 3(2) (Spring 2007), 1-10 Oxford College of Emory University

http://www.jcal.emory.edu/viewarticle.php?id=83&layout=html

Wright, S. (1998) Multi-Modality in a New Key: The Significance of the Arts in Research and EducationCentre for Applied Studies in Early Childhood, QUT

http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/wri02327.htm