A New Frame of Mind: Whole-Mindedness

“Why do we teach the arts in education?” asks Jennifer Groff (Learning Games Network) in this Harvard Educational Review article. Many arts educators have used Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to justify their work, arguing that the existence of spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and musical intelligences confirm the importance of visual arts, theater, dance, and music for children. But Groff believes that over time, the multiple-intelligences framework “has struggled to bear this burden.” A major problem has been its misapplication in schools – for example, having students sing their times tables, applying dance and song to any classroom topic, trying to align each intelligence with a racial group, and putting students in buckets (“She’s a visual learner”) in ways that limit their broader development. Ongoing criticism of Gardner’s theory “has ultimately left us on shaky ground,” she says.

Groff believes Gardner’s theory is a major contribution to the field, but she contends that findings in cognitive neuroscience have changed the playing field in the last 30 years. Brain-imaging technology has shifted our view of the mind from modular (each area performing specific functions) to networked, with cognitive functions distributed across many regions. In addition, the discovery of how malleable the brain is has refuted the idea that a person’s mind is fixed or static; in fact, it’s dynamic and responsive to experiences throughout the lifespan. 

Scientists have also found that people use three different processing systems to take in new information:

• Object-visual (static, pictorial images – painting, graphic design, photography);
• Spatial-visual (manipulating images – film, digital media, and simulations);
• Verbal (language-based – literature and oral communication).

“Simply put, our cognitive processing systems are the foundation for our engagement with the world,” says Groff. “All are used to different extents to process, manipulate, understand, and apply to distinct problems. Each is unique and each is necessary yet together they afford the potential for powerful and insightful processing and problem solving… Helping learners develop and, more critically, understand how to use and leverage these processing systems as tools through which to engage with the world is central to healthy, rich, and balanced cognitive development.”

Groff continues: “Although the cognitive processing systems work together, research shows that individuals demonstrate a preference for and strength in at least one of them.” These preferences may be innate, but as children grow up, their preferences tend to be self-reinforcing, with the strong areas getting stronger and the other areas not developing as much. “While some individuals are able to make do in learning environments that lean heavily on one of these mechanisms, others cannot. That is of real concern to those interested in providing an equitable and fair education to all.”

Before television, most human discourse and input was verbal, says Groff. With the introduction first of TV and then digital video media, non-verbal communication has become the dominant construct in our world. The overwhelming majority of young people are bathed in this environment, but schools have been slower to make the shift. In fact, says Groff, “we are developing a generation of visually dominant cognitive processors but immersing them and assessing them in a verbally dominant environment.” Around 80 percent of people are stronger in non-verbal than verbal processing, but schools are not developing all three processing modes in a balanced way, nor are we helping them help each other. 

All this leads Groff and others to propose a new approach: whole-mindedness. “In essence,” she says, “whole-mindedness suggests that each of us possesses these three cognitive processing systems, which will manifest themselves uniquely in each individual, but that robust cognitive development comes from the opportunity to engage with and support the development of each processing system to ultimately be used in synergy.” And this is where arts education comes in, providing a mix of spatial-visual and object-visual experiences. Groff says that schools should:

• Develop strengths. Teachers should assess each child’s strong domain and support its development.
• Develop non-strengths. Classrooms should give students opportunities to develop their less-dominant areas starting at an early age. 
• Scaffold from non-strengths. Schools should provide support, including technology, to augment and support students when they need to use a non-dominant processing system.
• Create authentic assessments. Students should have assessment experiences that allow them to use their dominant cognitive processing system. 

All this is especially important because in today’s digital world, everyone is being bombarded by “rapidly presented, emotionally charged visual stimuli that need to be processed holistically and quickly,” says Groff (quoting Blazhenkova and Kozhevnikov). 

What does a more-balanced approach look like in the classroom? Since 2004, one course at the Harvard Medical School has taken doctors-in-training on weekly visits to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to improve their examining and diagnosis skills through observation and drawing. Professors have seen marked improvements through this blend of object-visual and verbal experiences. A parallel experience in a middle-school science classroom would be for students to closely analyze and sketch the slight differences in the moon’s silhouette or various types of cells. In this kind of experience, Groff says two things happen: “First, students with a natural disposition toward a visual-object processing system are able to engage with and leverage their strength, something each of us longs and needs to do from time to time. Second, all students have the opportunity to engage and develop this processing system in parallel with the others, which may help to more fully develop cognitive capacities that are leveraged in other ways later in life.” 

“As we strive toward whole-mindedness,” Groff concludes, “learners can be freed from their buckets – and so can the arts in education. The arts not only represent a wide spectrum of crafts and domains valued by society in so many ways, but also represent core modalities that align with cognitive constructs in the mind-brain – constructs that are critical to our development as individuals and to a society that has entered a visual revolution.” 

“Expanding Our ‘Frames’ of Mind for Education and the Arts” by Jennifer Groff in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2013 (Vol. 83, #1, p. 15-39), www.harvardeducationalreview.org

From the Marshall Memo #482