Democracy Using Multiple Intelligences and Art

Democracy, Multiple Intelligence, Art

Project Site and Participants

The project that this research is based on took place at Pantera Elementary School in Diamond Bar, California. The school population comprises approximately 200 students and twelve teachers. The ethnic make-up of Pantera is as follows: 36.8% Asian, 19.8% Hispanic, 35.9% White, 2.9% Filipino,.5% Pacific Islander and.4% American Indian/Alaskan. Neighborhoods within Pantera's boundaries are middle- and upper-middle class, with some new, upscale housing. Pantera has 2.2% of its students identified as limited English proficient students who collectively speak 13 languages other than English. Eleven percent of the students in grades 4 and 5 have been identified for the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program.

The fifth-grade class targeted in this research is typical of the school population in terms of ethnic diversity and class standing. Two students have been identified as limited English proficient students and seven are identified as GATE students. There are also two students in a reading specialist program (RSP).

The students in this class were allowed to discover their own strengths using a multiple-intelligence-based curriculum, which both empowered them as individuals and allowed them to develop the core skills that any individual will need to succeed in our high-tech society.

Introduction

We are often been told that education lies at the root of our democracy. And this is true - but also an overgeneralization. Children can be taught in the classroom to reject democratic ideals as easily as they can be taught to embrace them. This paper argues that a democratically structured classroom - in which students are both instructed and empowered - is indeed a powerful tool for creating the citizens of tomorrow. But a classroom in which children are put into standardized boxes - as is becoming increasingly the case - is one in which the principles of democracy are not only ignored but squandered. This research examines two particularly powerful tools for inculcating in children the critical thinking skills necessary for becoming engaged and effective citizens of a democracy - teaching based on multiple intelligence and the integration of the performing and visual arts into the curriculum.

It should come as no surprise to us that children - and adults - learn in different ways and that we can use different learning styles and different kinds of intelligences to help children achieve their greatest potential. While there are a number of different ways in which the idea of multiple intelligence can be used to provide classroom instruction, one of the most powerful may be to integrate the concept of multiple intelligence and the praxis of art education. Participating in the arts - music, dance, and visual art - helps children learn not only about the arts themselves but also about a wide range of other subjects. Teaching the arts in schools is both an end in itself - i.e. It teaches children to value and understand expressive forms of culture - but it can also be a means to another end, empowering children to learn other subjects such as math or reading with greater ease and enthusiasm. This research has demonstrated the usefulness and importance (one might even argue the imperativeness) of teaching the arts in school. With so many states now facing dire financial problems and with arts-in-schools budgets one of the very first things to be cut whenever such budgetary crises loom, it is important that we remember that arts education is not a luxury but in fact lies at the heart of the educational process - as well as at the heart of the democratic process.

Children enjoy participating in the arts, and when adults see children having such a good time it is often hard for them to imagine that the children may also be at the same time mastering complex cognitive skills, but this is an artifact of the ways in which adults conceive of learning. For adults, learning is often associated with work and so it opposed to enjoyable and pleasurable activities. But for children, learning itself is a pleasure and meshes perfectly with (and reinforces) other forms of learning. However, this discovery of the joy inherent in learning is all-too often absent from classrooms in which "the teachers teaches and the students are taught; the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing" (Freire, 2001, p. 73).

This paper found that education in all of the art forms benefits children by increasing their cognitive skills: When children engage in the arts they are able to access and incorporate many different learning styles and intelligence factors that enhance not only their learning within the arts themselves but also verbal and written skills. The effectiveness of teaching through the arts as a way of supporting a multiple intelligence approach to learning in this particular class - in which children first participated in an arts-based unit of study on the American Revolution, then developed independent research projects and then empowered themselves as their own partners in education by presenting what they had learned at a conference for social justice at Chapman University - was measured using qualitative methodologies. These methodologies, including videotaping, are sufficiently sensitive to provide a base for analysis of the complex ways in which children learn.

Diane Halpern, who chairs the psychology department at California State University, San Bernardino, supports the idea that arts education can and should be measured qualitatively by incorporating, among other tools, videotaping mechanisms (1999). It is impossible to measures some intangibles prevalent in arts education, and the only effective means to evaluate performances are in fact qualitative (Murray, 1999). Appleby asserts that "what's needed in higher education are better tools fore assessing soft skills. Standardized tests and simplistic rating scales can't do the job, most educators agree" (Murray, 1999, p. 1). This research joins such qualitative methodologies to the use of a narrative/qualitative assessment of students' learning capabilities.

The arts - whether visual or performance - represent the range of ways in which people come to know as well as to relate to and interact with the world. Arts, and other subjects that we come to understand through an arts-based education, allow us to experiment with innovative approaches to thinking as well as acting, pushing each individual - and especially each child - to stretch his or her limits to develop themselves to the fullest potential.

There is evidence that working with the arts, especially in grades kindergarten through seven, develops students' minds and bodies in ways that enable them to learn better. The arts, particularly music, dance, and visual art, develop neural connections and body/brain connections which further learning in many areas, including math, reading, writing, and general language development. Having students work with creative drama and theatre in these earlier grades gives them a great advantage in their capacity for developing language skills, reading, writing, and verbal, and interpersonal skills. And all of the arts help students develop emotionally and socially, so that they are more prepared to deal with school, life, and other people (http://www.aaae.org/research.html#abilities).

The findings of this research reinforce previous findings that children are indeed natural artists, often using arts as a means to express themselves through color, form, sound and movement in ways that are more sophisticated than their other means of expression. Children are often capable of expressing complicated and highly nuanced message through art when they are not yet capable of doing so through other media (such as written or spoken language) and because of this they can use their education in the arts to jump-start their skills in other areas.

This research found that it is indeed the case that arts-based learning is a vehicle through which students can learn subjects such as language, history and mathematics. Moreover, when they learn these core subjects through poetry, song, narratives, painting, dance and drama they not only find that these subjects come more easily in many cases but also that there is better retention. This research found that arts-based learning supports a stronger model for engaging individual learning styles and preferences and tapping into children's "multiple intelligences" even as arts-based learning has the power to increase student self-esteem by encouraging a range of forms of self-expression.

Finally, this research found through both direct observation and through the self-reporting of subjects at the Chapman conference that an arts-based education promotes the active involvement of students as well as encouraging open communication among students and between students and teachers as well as appreciation by both teachers and students of the different ways in which people can learn. Arts-based learning promotes a tolerance for ambiguity, a tolerance for (and even an insistence on) difference and diversity.

The following citation summarizes the general findings of this research:

And there is evidence that when the arts are connected in meaningful ways with other subject areas, students comprehend and retain more about the subjects involved. Arts programs have been quite effective in teaching math, science, reading, writing, general language development, history, and social studies.

In addition, there are numerous good examples of how the arts have aided in the teaching of other languages, including English as a foreign language; and how the arts assist teachers in more effectively reaching students with disabilities and learning disorders (http://www.aaae.org/research.html#abilities).

However, while this research found that an arts-based education is beneficial to all children, this does not mean that all children benefit from it in exactly the same way. Indeed, it would be highly counter-intuitive if they did given that one of the reasons that an arts-based education is useful to begin with is that the many different aspects of such an education (from dance to painting) are helpful in educating children precisely because they are so diverse. Arts-based education is inherently geared toward an evaluation of each child in terms of multiple intelligences.

The model of multiple intelligences that has been used throughout this research was developed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Based on his own extensive research he argued that intelligence was not a single quality but rather eight different sets of skills. (His initial model included only seven forms of intelligence). These different types of intelligence are verbal-linguistic, math-logical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist." (McKenzie, 1999).

This research found that there are important differences between the ways in which boys and girls learn, with the first test showing that girls tend to be primarily auditory while boys are mostly visual and the second test showing that girls are mostly interpersonal and boys are mostly visual. The advantage of an arts-based education is that it appeals to all of these four learning styles and types of intelligence at the same time so that all students can benefit and there is in fact no child is left behind.

Arts-based education, especially when joined with the concept of multiple intelligences in some ways goes against much of many of the developments in the public schools over the last decades. While standardized tests in the form of IQ tests have been given to some people for years and older students have for decades taken exams such as the SAT to help them gain entrance into prestigious colleges and the MCAT to help them gain entrance into medical school. But the past decade has seen an increasing trend to test students at a young and younger age so that middle and elementary school students are now taking exams along with the older counterparts in high school and college.

These standardized tests - such as the Stanford Nine - are designed to test a student comprehensively, across all learning areas from math to science to reading to writing. In addition to testing the students' knowledge in each of these areas, these now-popular standardized exams are also supposed to test each school's effectiveness in preparing its students; in other words, such are part of the current movement designed to hold schools "accountable" for how well their students are doing.

While it is, of course, important to ensure that students are being prepared by the school system to make the most of their own potential, there are a number of objections that can be raised to an emphasis on standardized tests. Most objections to the exams fall into two basic categories. The first of these set of objections are the same that have been levied against the SAT and similar achievement tests for a number of years, which is that they are biased toward white middle-class and upper-middle-class students and that more than intelligence or potential to achieve they test a person's class background. Another important objection to them is that they are a reversion to an older view of human cognition in which there is only one form of intelligence to be measured. This more limited idea of intelligence as expressed in standardized tests has tended to shift school curricula away from the idea of multiple intelligences and as a result to do a disservice to those students who do not learn in the particular ways that are emphasized in classrooms in which teachers are responsible for preparing their students to do well on standardized tests.

Freire argues that such forms of standardized education are fundamentally oppressive, catering to students with only one or two preferred mechanisms of learning - primarily verbal and logical/reasoning. He points out that oppression is dehumanizing, affecting "both the oppressor and the oppressed" (Freire, 2001, p. 47). He claims that the "oppressed are afraid to embrace freedom; the oppressors are afraid of losing the 'freedom' to suppress" (Freire, 2001, p. 46).

The use of arts-based teaching to provide the most effective education possible for a range of children reflects core Enlightenment values. "In the 20th century, innovators like John Dewey evolved systems of instruction based upon multiple-intelligence-like techniques, including Dewey's vision of the classroom as a microcosm of society" (Armstrong, 1994, p. 49). In other words, the idea of multiple intelligences, while relatively new in the particular formulation that is used in this paper, is in fact hardly a passing fad, but rather reflects long-established progressive models of learning and education.

While the work of reformers and philosophers like Dewey provided the broad guidelines for educational reform in the 20th century (with continuing repercussions into our own century of course), it was in many cases up to other educators - such as Montessori, Areglado, Grant and Gardner - to translate the philosophy of Dewey into practical classroom strategies. Much of the movement to translate to create workable everyday strategies for the kind of self-directed, active learning that Dewey advocated is gathered under the rubric of constructivism.

Constructivism is based on the idea that learning is as natural to humans as breathing air. We can't help doing it, especially when we are children. Our desire to find out how the world works is deeply programmed into our brains, encouraged over the generations by evolutionary selection. But while learning is natural, teaching is not and much of the goal of constructivism is an attempt to create the best possible match between the natural desire for children to learn (and their inherent skill at doing so) and the artificiality of the classroom environment.

While there are certainly dozens of slightly different definitions of the idea of constructivism - and its opposite, the kind of traditional classroom in which the teacher took the active role and students were expected simply to absorb the information given to them - these different definitions overlap in large measure. A traditional approach to teaching may be summarized in the following way:

Traditional education sees intelligence as inherent in the human mind and therefore in no need of being learned. This would mean that it is proper for school to teach facts, ideas, and values on the assumption that human beings (of any age) are endowed by nature with the ability to use them (Kafai & Resnick, 1996, p. 11).

Constructivist teaching makes the practice of both teaching and learning more opaque and more subject to scrutiny. Constructivist teaching is the "art of setting up situations in which the learner will 'construct knowledge'" (Kafai & Resnick, 1996, p. 10). The constructivist model of learning assume that the way in which humans (and especially children) learn about the word is through actively exploring that world and constructing models about how things in the world work. This can be seen to be in many ways as analogous to the ways in which science works: A child, like a scientist, begins with a hypothesis, tests it through a series of (naturalistic) experiments, then refines the hypothesis as a result of those experiments and then begins the process of learning - or experimenting or constructing knowledge - all over again.

It should be clear that such a model has important implications for the process of education, for constructivist models of learning require that teachers create situations in which students are required to "construct" knowledge; that is, they are required to bring a very active mindset to bear on the problem. Thus schools should mirror natural learning situations in which cognitive development depends on active exploration of the world around one.

Constructivism is a philosophy of learning based on the concept that when individuals learn they do not passively acquire or absorb a new understanding. Instead, new information is actively assimilated into existing cognitive structures while simultaneously altering these structures. Therefore what individuals learn is always framed within the context of what they already know; each of us generates our own models and our own individual understanding of the world (http://education.ed.pacificu.edu/aacu/workshop/constructivism.html).

The current models of education, which emphasize the value of standardized testing as the best way to determine whether children are learning, are overly limited. These current models fail to acknowledge the different kinds of intelligences that exist in the human population. Moreover, by emphasizing facts and other aspects of learning that can be easily tested, current trends in education often fail to acknowledge the importance of ambiguity that exists in the world at large.

Standardized tests both have the ability fundamentally to reshape the way in which children are taught in school and also have potentially significant effects on their futures. This might be acceptable - certainly it would be more acceptable to many people - if the tests did not appear to many to be racially and class biased as well as biased against certain kinds of learning and intelligences. Even with these objections, standardized tests might be acceptable if these exams provided a clear indication of how well children were being educated and how well prepared they were for college and/or jobs. However, the relationship between such standardized tests and future success remains a problematic.

We are currently in a phase of the educational cycle in which the back-to-basics movement holds a great deal of sway in schools - although this is most obvious in the elementary through high school years, with lesser effects on college education and little effects at all on graduate education. This push to teach students certain basic core facts and ideas is admirable in some ways, but has tended to produce a classroom atmosphere in which rote learning is prized over the ability to analyze and understand material.

This trend toward teaching facts that students can be easily tested on reflects not only a back-to-basics approach but also an attempt to make schools more "accountable" - in some ways to apply business and economic models to judge how well schools are performing. This reflects social and political ideas about the role that schools and education should play rather than ideas about how learning actually occurs.

Most traditional methods of teaching reading have emphasized the importance of memorization over critical thinking. While it is certainly true that students must acquire a certain body of particular facts - for intelligence without the fuel of facts does very little good indeed - far more important than specific facts is the ability to assess and understand these facts in relationship to the rest of the world, and such an ability is only possible through the use of critical thinking. One of the key questions in the teaching of reading is at what point repetition should be amended by an emphasis on critical thinking skills. This has been a question for centuries:

It was the attitude that came with the Enlightenment and particularly the ideas of Rousseau that produced a society receptive to a real change. If the child was not learning, it was because Nature's way was not being followed: teachers were placing the subject first and not the child. From now on, those whose teaching methods used the child as a receptacle into which knowledge was pushed would be on the defensive (http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/wilson/wilson10.html#r1)

As teachers and citizens, we must be more attentive to the importance of teaching critical thinking skills to allow students to develop their own form of intelligence in the most effective way possible so that each new generation is capable of taking its place within the complexities of the our high-tech, diverse democracy.

Critical thinking is integral to education and rationality and, as an idea, is traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practices - and the educational ideal implicit in them - of Socrates of ancient Greece. It has played a seminal role in the emergence of academic disciplines as well as in the work of discovery of those who created them (http://www.criticalthinking.org/ncect.html).

Certainly some amount of repetition is needed in teaching reading - as it is in teaching everything. But it also seems clear that the current push for standardized test results uber alles is based in larger cultural and political ideas as well as in actual research on teaching and that the best way to teach children (or adults) is in fact some combination of a moderate amount of repetition joined to a healthy dose of critical thinking.

An arts-based education that allows children to learn core concepts (from reading to math skills) through the use of their own particular combination of intelligences and learning styles will produce children who are not only well grounded in the basics but also have the critical thinking skills and the ability to express themselves that are essential for life in the 21st century.

Research Questions

In my six years as a classroom teacher, I have discovered numerous ways for students to express themselves, and even more ways to gain knowledge and understand the universe in which they live. These ways in clued many of the components of the multiple intelligence theory; yet at first, I did not realize this. Individuals are capable, as the theory of multiple intelligences advocates, of deep understanding and master in the most profound areas of human experiences. Even before I critically examined the theory developed by Gardner (1983), I began to foster the intelligences of my students by providing means for each student to express him/herself using individual strengths and capabilities.

As the standards movement washed over my school site, I became determined not to limit intelligence and student voice in my classroom as the standard movement so often does. I continued to study the work of Gardner on multiple intelligences and Freire (2001) on the connection between democratic ideals and the structure of the classroom. I realized that intelligence cannot be measured by short-answer tests because they do not measure disciplinary mastery or deep understanding. They only measure rote memorization skills and one's ability to do well on short-answer tests.

Suddenly, a teaching goal became apparent to me: I wanted to provide my students with a curriculum that would include an assessment of their multiple intelligences that will foster their learning and problem-solving styles. Multiple intelligences pedagogy implies that teachers teach and assess differently based on individual strengths and weaknesses. My preferences became a curriculum that allows for students to demonstrate multiple ways of understanding and value their uniqueness rather than teaching everyone the same material and assuming that everyone has a fixed amount of the same type of intelligence.

A also drew upon the work of Dr. Roger Taylor (rogertaylor.com). Much of Dr. Taylor's work focuses on the use of multiple intelligences with gifted and highly capable students. His unique design, called the Analyzing Human Activities (AHA) model, includes specific applications of the most recent brain research, multiple intelligences, and constructivist hands-on, project-centered learning. As previously stated, one-fourth of my students have been identified as gifted, so Dr. Taylor's model was fully appropriate for my own class.

My desire has and will continue to be the development of a core curriculum that takes into account the potential "multiple intelligences" of my students. By targeting the arts, I have incorporated the art of sensory perception and engaged students' abilities visually, verbally and physically to learn in a scholastic environment. In considering the most appropriate method to teach students by engaging all of their senses, I have postulated the following research questions:

1. What kind of curriculum can I provide my students that will enable them to experience a democratic way of learning?