Week 9. Multiple Intelligence or a Global Mind

This week’s topic about Multiple intelligence has raised a lot of questions. And while some of my colleagues argue that it is of no relevance to the large groups I can see it being efficient in my case. Most of my groups are small and I know all of my students very well. I teach them from the beginning to the end (with some random exceptions) and I can definitely identify each of them as having one or other predominant type of learning based on the type of intelligence that prevails in them.

And from now on the sentence, that I found while reading about multiple intelligences on the site Concept to Classroom http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/mi/index_sub2.html has marked my teaching. It says: “The next time you have a chance to reflect on your class, imagine your students as individuals who have fully realized and developed their intelligences.” That is really something we should keep in mind. Comparing our class to a class with J.K. Rowling, Richard Feynmann, Lauryn Hill, Julian Schnabel, Mia Hamm, Colin Powell, Deepak Chopra, Jane Goodall, and Gary Larson is an extremely powerful and easy way to put it. I imagined my class. Now each time I look at them or give them an assignment I keep this idea in my mind.

Undoubtedly our students are different and they all learn differently and as a teacher I have always wondered why some of the students that had modest results turned up to be very successful in real life, career, and personal life than the students that showed good academic results.

Now going from Gardener’s definition of intelligence: “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings”  the question above becomes clear to me. One may possess a set of knowledge which s/he hardly uses or one can know the scheme of how s/he can find this knowledge and going from the need - apply every little bit s/he learns. Therefore it is not the mere memorization of content that matters it is the ability to create not to reproduce.

Unfortunately the Education System in Moldova is heavily based on reproduction. This is why in many cases the students don’t see the link between what they reproduce and real life and lose the motivation for learning. They don’t see how they could possibly apply what they learn because they are taught globally. They are viewed as all the same with the same mind (they are not given tips of interdisciplinary connection that would enlighten the bulb in the mind and make the connection with their area of interest or kind of intelligence). And they are expected to figure out by themselves how to apply what they learn.

Last week a colleague of mine threw a phrase that comes right in this context. She said: “Math teachers teach the students the formula of how to determine the area of a surface, but my child does not know how to estimate how much wall paper we need for his room. Is that normal? Why does he learn maths at all if he can’t do that much?” She is right – what is the use of teaching formulae if the students don’t see how to transfer them into a real life situation and use it when they need it most?

Gardener’s Multiple Intelligence theory brings a new approach towards the human mind. Where the mind is presented as a multicolored map of the world where some countries are bigger than others and their degree of influence in the world is different. There is no such a thing as better or worse, there is just the term of diverse. And I think that this diversity is great. No two minds are alike. And the trends of “globalization” have proved to be detrimental to the cultures and national identity worldwide. Can’t the same happen with the trend of “globalizing” the minds of our students? Will the individual melt and disappear in the global standard mind? Will we have "overweight" mind trends because of this mind "globalisation"?