MI Outside the Classroom During COVID-19

In this article from Psychology Today, Darcia Narvaez—professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, describes some abilities that may be developed better outside traditional classrooms. While so many schools around the world remain closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Narvaez describes 8 intelligences that parents and children can work on together at home with useful links to additional teaching resources.

The full article is reproduced below.

Psychology Today

6 Kinds of Abilities Children May Learn Better Outside Classrooms

Darcia Narvaez | April 15, 2020

What can children learn outside school?

Howard Gardner has been a proponent of what he has named "multiple intelligences." School work typically emphasizes linguistic (of a certain kind) and logico-mathematical skills, developed through reading and mathematics, the focus of most school tests these days. But there are at least six other kinds of abilities that Gardner and others have mapped, using strict criteria, which I focus on here. Gardner's eight theorized categories of mental ability (which are different from the concept of general intelligence) are representative of the talents and knowhow we see among adults generally.

Note, in every case, it is important to follow children’s interests (though you can draw attention to things and see what grabs them) and build curiosity with questions like, I wonder how….?

Here are eight groupings of abilities that parents and kids can work on outside of schoolwork.

1. Linguistic: involves the learning and use of language, from reading to writing to speaking one’s own or additional languages.

• Here is a site that describes options for online foreign language learning options for kids.

2. Logico-mathematical: includes not only mathematical reasoning but the ability to detect patterns and reason deductively, much like Sherlock Holmes.

• Here are some logic puzzles for children that can be printed. And here and here are places where you can help scientists as a citizen scientist.

3. Bodily-Kinesthetic: describes how a person moves his body in space. Star athletes have high kinesthetic ability. Think of the soccer or football player who is able to move the ball among a spread of opponents. Think of dancers (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers come to mind, with Ginger doing everything “backwards and in heels”). But also think of how this sort of ability is involved in cooking (cutting vegetables), roofing (not falling off), and just walking down the street avoiding running into anything.

• Children learn to move their bodies through interactive play with others, through dancing and sport practice (e.g., dribbling a ball). They can also learn through indoor obstacle courses and everyday challenges like carrying a glass of water without spilling. Here are more ideas.

4. Musical: involves carrying a tune, playing an instrument and giving nuance in musical performance. Composing and arranging music takes knowhow about particular instruments’ capabilities and harmonization. Jazz playing takes on-the-spot awareness and flexibility, where each musician is responding to the other in real time.

• Children can sing, inventing or mimicking songs they heard. They can create a dance routine or make a composition with different sounds from their body. They can learn to play an instrument with dedicated, coached practice. But they can also learn to appreciate music and identify better and worse performances. The family or even communities can sing together, a tradition in Denmark. This can happen online, as occurs under shelter-in-place orders. Here is a site with bully-proof song videos.

5. Spatial: what we see in engineers who are able to imagine the workings of machines, bridges, or cities.

• When children build things, they are fostering spatial skills, whether it's creative Lego building or constructing forts or machines. Here are exercises that parents can use with children.

6. Interpersonal: concerns the art of getting along with others. Relational attunement is the ability to flexibly respond to the other in the moment, without an agenda or manipulation. The ability to understand others, be patient and responsive in working through conflicts are aspects that are related to doing well in life generally.

• Role-playing and acting out stories with others builds these abilities. Learning to mediate conflicts helps children learn to take the perspectives of others. Here are more suggestions.

7. Intrapersonal: has to do with knowing yourself, your preferences, your intuitions, your needs. Good therapy involves developing this ability so that the baggage of misconceptions about self (e.g., being in danger, being worthless) can be dropped.

• Children are still in the course of building themselves and need lots of different experiences to grow. Still, the best way to help them build intrapersonal ability is to let them follow their impulses for growth. Erich Fromm notes a case where a parent interfered with a child’s growth impulses: a boy came home and gushed about a new friend. The parent did not approve of that child’s background and discouraged the boy from playing with that child. The parent continued to interfere with the son’s choices of friendships (for reasons of prejudice), undermining the son’s growth and happiness. Here are ideas for parents and kids.

8. Naturalist: involves awareness of natural entities and systems. In our ancestral contexts (hunter-gatherer), it is a type of interpersonal ability because other entities in nature are treated as sentient and alive.

• In the backyard, children can play in mud or sand, construct habitats for animals or insects, garden for pollinators or kitchen food. More ideas here. For parents who really want to dig in, here is a PDF with a host of ideas.

Other kinds of abilities that have not made it into Gardner’s list, but have been considered, include Spiritual, Existentialist, and Moral. Nonwestern cultures still support these today, as a matter of being a good human being.

When I was a classroom middle school Spanish teacher for several years, I tried to incorporate Gardner's ideas in my instruction. Today as a university professor I try to do the same. We play folk song games with each other and with children as a way to learn them all at once (linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal) and to find joy in the moment.

More ideas for developing these abilities that can be adopted for home life are here.

References

Gardner, Howard (1983) Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, Howard (1999) Intelligence Reframed. Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, New York: Basic Books.

Existential intelligence during COVID-19 crisis

An undergraduate student from Long Island, New York, recently wrote asking the following question. 

I was hoping you would be able to provide some insight on the “Frame of Mind” of people in quarantine from Coronavirus. Since there has been a dynamic shift in our perception of reality due to fear, do you believe that while people are isolated in quarantine Existential Intelligence is ever more present in children? 

Schools aren't exactly teaching existentialism but the classroom that exists beyond a physical space is now as prominent as ever. Kierkegaard's notion of angst may have relevance here. Children desire structure and routine in school to reduce anxiety in the classroom, now only to be uprooted by the unknown. Children are left to ask, "Why?" 

Howard Gardner responds:

I think that's a very reasonable assumption. A lot depends on two factors:

1. How the adults (and the media) deal with COVID-19. When children get a clear and unambiguous signal from their parents and other respected adults, they are likely to accept the situation. On the other hand, when they sense that their parents are not on the same page, watch out!

2. Whether the children listen carefully to the answers to their questions and wrestle with them. I've often quipped that all children that I know like to ask questions—but children differ in whether the asking is the point, or whether they also deal with and follow up on the responses that they receive.

New Superhero Inspired by MI Theory

A new female superhero for a series of graphic science fiction novels has been created with inspiration from MI Theory.

The character, Dr. Cecelia Cobbina, is an African-American woman and physician with Doctors Without Borders who features in Omni: The Doctor Is In, Vol. 1 published by Humanoids. Cobbina is a genius who can cycle through nine types of intelligence like a human computer. The author, Devin Grayson, talked about the creative process behind the new character in an interview with Maurice Boyer of Publishers Weekly:

“Once I had decided I wanted Cecelia to have every kind of identified human intelligence, I had to figure out what they all were. That pretty quickly led me to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (from Howard Gardner’s 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences)... One of the first breakdowns I saw was in the form of a colorful chart, which I realized could help inform how we developed the power visually: I associated each intelligence modality with its own color and avatar so that we could literally see Cecelia thinking.”

Read the whole article here.

7 Things You Should Know About Multiple Intelligences

I recently received a link to the below blog post from Thomas Armstrong of the American Institute for Learning and Human Development, you may find it interesting. Click here to go to the website.

Howard Gardner

7 Things You Should Know About Multiple Intelligences

By Thomas Armstrong

I received an email last week from someone who said his school had required him to buy a book that claimed Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was a myth.  Naturally, as someone who has written and taught about this theory for the past thirty-four years, I was disturbed by this revelation.  To help set the record straight, I list here seven things you should know about the theory of multiple intelligences before going off the track and dismissing the theory altogether.

1. There Are Actually 8 1/2 Intelligences.  Gardner originally started out with 7 intelligences when his book Frames of Mind first came out in 1983.  In 1997 he added the ”naturalist” intelligence (because he believed it met the criteria for an intelligence – see point #6 below).  In 1999, in his book Intelligence Reframed, he began to talk about the ”existential” intelligence (the intelligence of concern with ultimate life issues) because it also met most of the criteria for an intelligence, but not quite enough to qualify as a full-fledged intelligence, hence the 1/2 (which he talks about to a certain extent with tongue in cheek).

2. Multiple Intelligences is Not a Way of Teaching. Some of the criticism of multiple intelligences has arisen as a part of the now deeply entrenched ”evidence-based” movement in education which seems to require that every teaching strategy should be subjected to random controlled trials, where one group receives a specific instructional intervention and is compared with a group that didn’t based on pre- and post-testing.  Out of this, a statistic is derived, most often an ”effect size” (e.g. .4 is seen as borderline for an ”evidence-based” strategy).  Well, you simply can’t DO this with multiple intelligences, which, please note, is a theory, not a single classroom intervention.  But because one can’t derive a single statistic (or set of statistics) from the theory, people assume this means it is a myth.  This is crazy talk.  It’s like saying that the fields of existentialism, humanism, and pragmatism are myths because they can’t be reduced to a set of statistics.  In reality, there’s another ”ism” that is at the root of this problem:  logical positivism, which is a philosophy that holds that what is ”true” can only be expressed through numbers and logic!

3. Multiple Intelligences Can Be Applied in Hundreds of Ways.  Dovetailing off of point #2, there are innumerable ways to apply the theory of multiple intelligences, and some of these specific ways are in fact supported by the existing evidence-based literature.  Robert Marzano, for example, who is one of the evidence-based gurus of education, lists one evidence-based approach for teaching vocabulary to students as:  ”Ask students to construct a picture, pictograph, or symbolic representation of the term.”  This would be regarded as an excellent spatial (or picture smart) application of multiple intelligences.  And there are scores of examples besides this one.  Again, you can’t roll the whole of multiple intelligences into a ball and tell whether or not it’s evidence-based.  You need to unwind the strands and examine them one by one.

4. There Are Several Ways to Goof Up Using Multiple Intelligences.  As noted in point #3, there are hundreds of ways of legitimately applying the theory of multiple intelligences, but there are also a number of ways it can be misapplied.  One way is by assuming that each student is strongest in only one intelligence, and then labeling that student with that intelligence (e.g. ”our picture smart child”), and then giving them only material that relates to that intelligence. Gardner actually had to do a video broadcast for Australian media many years ago, because they were reporting how each intelligence was matched to a specific racial type! Gardner is clear in stating that every child has all eight and a half of the intelligences, and can develop them to a degree of proficiency within certain limits.

5. Multiple Intelligences May Increase Test Scores, But If It Doesn’t That Doesn’t Mean It’s a Myth.  This point also relates to the critics’ dismissal of multiple intelligences because of their belief that it doesn’t ”raise test scores.” Well, the jury is out on that, because, again, it depends upon which aspects of multiple intelligences are being applied, and we’re back to ”effect sizes” (e.g. an effect size is the difference between the standard deviations of two groups based upon, guess what? test scores).  The fact that multiple intelligences may actually make students deeper, more engaged, more thoughtful students doesn’t seem to enter the mind of these number-crazed critics.

6. More People Should Study the Multiple Intelligences Criteria. The word ”evidence” can mean a lot of things – it doesn’t have to just refer to statistics and numbers (what about the ”evidence” given in a jury trial?).  Gardner actually marshals a great deal of evidence in support of the 8 1/2 intelligences, and they can be found described in his first book on the subject:  Frames of Mind, published in 1983 (and revised in 2011).  In one chapter of the book, he explains how multiple intelligences are supported by evidence from brain science, developmental psychology, semiotics, cognitive psychology, cognitive archaeology, animal physiology, and the biographies and autobiographies of exceptional people (including savants and the geniuses of culture).  Put THAT in your Funk and Wagnall’s!  (the reference is to the TV show ”Laugh In” that aired from 1968-1973)

7. Multiple Intelligences is Best Examined by Studying Life.  Here we come to I think the crux of the matter.  Multiple intelligences is not best assessed, analyzed, or examined through numbers, as seems to be the demand of those who claim this theory is a myth.  Instead, one must look to LIFE for the evidence of this theory’s vitality. You can see evidence for the multiple intelligences virtually everywhere:  in the symbol systems people use (e.g. words, numbers, pictures, musical notes), in the ways cultures value them (e.g. systems of music, mathematics, physical culture, social organizations), in the great thinkers of our time (e.g. Einstein, Picasso, Martin Luther King, Martha Graham), in the ways animals deploy their assets (e.g. birds use of musical intelligences, ants exploit social intelligence, chimpanzees display use of primitive forms of linguistic intelligence), and there is much more that this theory helps to explain.  In fact, there’s such a wealth of material opened up by this theory that could take a person a lifetime to assimilate and digest.

In other words, the main reason why I have been so enamored of this theory since my discovery of it in 1985 is because it brings to life so many dimensions of the human condition that I am always discovering new things within it.  This compares with the excruciatingly boring statistical analyses used by those who accuse multiple intelligences of being a myth.  Well, the Greek word for myth is ”mythos” which means ”story.” Howard Gardner has told a story about the human mind that to my mind is still unrivaled in the fields of psychology and education.  So, critics, stop already with the devaluations and denigrations, and take a moment or two to turn toward the big picture of existence, and bask in the brilliance of a theory that can illuminate so many aspects of our lives that were previously hidden from view.

Which Intelligence Predicts Coding Ability?

Here’s a quick question for a fan of multiple intelligences theory: Which intelligence predicts how well a person learns to code?

If you’d asked me that question, I would probably have blurted out “logical-mathematical intelligence“ because computing seems a quintessential logical and mathematical task.

But I would’ve been wrong.

Chantel Prat and colleagues, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, decided to test out the options. And as reported in this article, the answer was not what one might have expected.

In fact, a better predictor of skill at coding is the linguistic skill of the individual in question. Put differently, individuals who are good at language—precise denotation and mastery of syntax are more likely to succeed at coding than individuals who are good at mathematics.

Of course once one knows the right answer, it’s easier to come up with, or contrive, an explanation.

According to the authors, success at coding depends upon a precise use of language with attention to every word, its meaning and its place in a sentence and a message being essential if you are not to botch the task. And so people who are sensitive to the denotations of words and truly a precise ordering and its implications have a heads up on success in learning to code. Or as my colleague Katie Davis put it, “coding is really like learning a second language.”

Of course, skills in logic and mathematics also help individuals learn to code. It’s just that in this particular race to success, language has the edge. And this study reminds us again that language and mathematics are not the same thing—as every high school teacher could confirm.

Read the full article here.