Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom

On or about September 1997, I started teaching in color. With the painful clarity of a myopic donning a new pair of glasses, I realized that for years I had been confining my literature students to a black-and-white universe, a world composed entirely of words. Now I began to think outside the linguistic square, opening my classroom to the visual arts, to music, to dance. With astonishment, I watched as my students metamorphosed from inert cocoons swathed by convention into innovative, articulate human beings. Pouring energies and talents I had never even suspected into acts of nonverbal literary analysis, they emerged as sharper readers, clearer thinkers, and more dynamic and skillful writers. Paradoxically, their release from language freed them back into language.

My conversion experience occurred, as paradigm shifts often do, in a classroom—but not my own. My eldest child had just started first grade, and I had been invited to attend "Meet the Teacher Night" at her elementary school. After a long day spent teaching in drab university lecture halls, entering my daughter's classroom was like stepping from a prison block into a rainforest. Books and educational toys spilled from the shelves; crayons and construction materials cluttered the tables; vibrant artwork lined the walls. One poster in particular caught my eye: an eight-petaled flower with the words I AM SMART emblazoned in the center. ART SMART, proclaimed one petal. NUMBER SMART, boasted another. And so on all around the daisy: WORD SMART; BODY SMART; MUSIC SMART; NATURE SMART; PEOPLE SMART; SELF SMART (see figure 1).

Figure 1.

Multiple intelligences daisy

My daughter's teacher introduced herself to the assembled parents and explained that the flower poster illustrated her interdisciplinary approach to learning. Rather than trying to squeeze all of her pupils into the same instructional mold, she said, she sought to foster their intellectual diversity, mitigating their weaknesses by harnessing their strengths. During their math lesson, for instance, the children in her class not only solved numerical equations; they also used their language skills to write and answer word problems, their spatial skills to draw illustrative diagrams, their manipulative skills to build kinesthetic models, and their interpersonal skills to work together in groups. From time to time they might explore mathematical concepts in music or go outside to discuss the role of numbers in nature. In the service of helping them become "number smart," in other words, the teacher drew upon all the "smarts" represented by the daisy's petals. Academically confident pupils were encouraged to enrich their understanding and expand their disciplinary horizons. And children struggling to master a given subject learned to forge alternative routes into knowledge.

Sitting there in a tiny chair as I listened to the teacher talk, I felt as though I were in first grade myself, starting my education anew. What would happen, I found myself wondering, if college students, too, were offered alternative routes into knowledge? Why do we pay lip service to "the whole child" in elementary school but then abandon that concept at the threshold to junior high, where children are abruptly shunted from their cozy single-teacher classrooms into separate subject classes taught by specialists whose chief educational agenda is, in essence, to clone themselves? Learning math from instructors who have never experienced the vertigo of innumeracy, English from teachers who have never been at a loss for words, students tend to flee their weakest subjects just as soon as the educational system allows them to do so, seeking out the comfort zone of academic specialization. All too many of us on the other side of the desk, meanwhile, unconsciously reward only those eager ephebes whose intellectual aptitudes most closely resemble our own.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Any primary school teacher would have instantly recognized the eight "smarts" on the teacher's daisy poster as kindergarten-vernacular versions of the eight "intelligences"—linguistic, spatial, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist—first identified by Howard Gardner in his groundbreaking 1983 book, Frames of Mind (see figure...