Is Style Everything?: Teaching That Achieves Its Objectives

Quite understandably, whatever our academic discipline, as teachers we focus on the challenging content of our courses, content that ranges from theoretical aesthetic concepts to complicated technical operations. However, our concentration on the substantive elements of appreciation, history, and production courses means that how we teach often receives secondary, even minimal attention, in favor of what we teach.¹ Shifting our attention to that “how,” without diminishing content, this article will explore the ways learning style (LS) preferences impact classroom presentations and assignments. After surveying conventional LS taxonomies, I will pursue the implications of LS theories for teaching cinema pedagogy. In considering LS applications, I will propose several useful tools to help both our students and us to achieve key academic goals, tools that any reflective teacher can implement.

Theoretical Background

Increasingly we’ve discovered that the capacity to learn is not monolithic. As early as 1983, in a critique of our conventional idea of intelligence as IQ, Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner argued for the recognition of “multiple intelligences” and that only if we expand and reformulate “our ingrained views of what counts as human intellect will we be able to devise more appropriate ways of assessing it and more effective ways of educating it.”² Fundamentally, multiple intelligences encompass diverse “learning domains”: cognitive (verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial); psychomotor (bodily-kinesthetic, musical); and affective (interpersonal and intrapersonal.) As teachers, we realize, then, that we’re confronting not only conventional notions of diversity but also of intellect, which manifest themselves in different learning styles. Further, knowledge of these domains leads to the awareness that preferred learning styles directly and dramatically impact all our educational choices.³

Typology

Learning styles are described through various taxonomies. The most popular and familiar LS paradigms divide learning preferences into three principal modes: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic; but most people, teachers included, approach new learning by means of a single or dominant path. Typically, each of us exploits a distinctive learning preference, while some individuals exhibit more balance in their approaches than others. As with right- or left-handedness, where we tend to reach for an object with one hand or the other although in many cases either will work, so one professor may herself rely on auditory pathways and learn best from hearing people talk about and discuss content. Another teacher may favor visual learning, finding solitary reading more effective, and yet another will prefer kinesthetic approaches and learn more effectively by physical manipulation, often seen in drawing charts and diagrams or “board work.” Teachers, then, employ instructional techniques compatible with their personal learning styles with the tacit assumption that their students share the same preferences. This, when inaccurate, disadvantages students with different inclinations.

Whatever the mix of learning preferences in a class, no one approach or single presentational style maximizes learning for all students. And so a reliance on a single avenue, often the unconscious preference of the instructor, forecloses ease of access by students with different profiles. Admittedly, once upper level undergraduates and graduate students specialize in their selected majors, their classes will be more homogeneous than in large undergraduate classes. We also know that some students choose, or counselors guide students into, film electives because they seem easier and potentially more entertaining. Consider that these students directed to film electives as opposed to literature courses are destined to struggle when confronted with the complexity of our subject, a struggle compounded if their LS preference differs from that of the professor. And yet even in the most apparently homogeneous classes (usually specialized, upper level courses) I find more variety than anticipated as students wrestle with assignments that I originally projected as relatively routine and undemanding. For example, in my upper level seminars,⁴ students must write guided journal responses to the film under study each week, must write several analytical essays on assigned topics during the semester, and must make an oral presentation on one film. Predictable differences appear between oral and written competency,⁵ but it is also not unusual for students to exhibit quite different aptitudes in the two writing assignments, some [End Page 96...