Mario Rinvolucri - An Introduction to Multiple Intelligences for TEFLERS
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To write a biodata for Mario Rinvolucri is to run the risk of writing an article; the simple solution would be to ask you to check the names on some of the resource books on your shelves, such as ‘Grammar Games’, ‘Once Upon A Time’ or ‘Dictation’ (Cambridge University Press), ‘Letters’ (Oxford University Press)……..
Mario (Mr. Rinvolucri, that is) is also one of the names behind Pilgrims in Canterbury, where he has been teaching and training since 1974, and currently edits the HLT (Humanising Language Teaching) Magazine (address at end of article)
If you want find out what multiple intelligences are, read Section 1.
For the theory of multiple intelligences, and how they relate to brain neurology, read Section 2.
If your main question is “what has all this got to do with my teaching?”, read Section 3.
In the West, the twentieth century was dominated by the idea that intelligence has two main strands: the logical -mathematical and the linguistic. This thinking was institutionalised in the standard intelligence tests that were used right throughout Western education to include some and exclude others. In the UK, for example, logical-mathematical and linguistic tests (the 11+) were used to separate the “clever” 12 year olds from the “dummies” so that 20% would go to grammar schools and 80% to secondary modern schools. In Chile, in the 1970s, university entrance depended on how well candidates did in Academic Aptitude Tests, which focused entirely on verbal and logical-mathematical ability. Teachers working within that system came to think of a person with a score of 400 as being dim, and those with 650 as being bright.
In those years the dominant, narrow view of intelligence was not only politically and institutionally accepted, but it was also swallowed whole by many teachers, myself included.
Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind, in 1986, came to challenge the “two intelligences” orthodoxy of the time.
He proposed that thinking falls into the following seven areas:
The Intra-personal intelligence.
When you are in this intelligence you are focused in (you are in what NLP calls “down-time”)
People experience this state of mind when they first wake up in the morning or on the way into sleep at night. A person who is strong in this intelligence needs time alone, and will suffer if they have to
socialise too much. Writing a diary no one else sees, getting deep into a book, or thinking much more than you ever say are some of the hallmarks of this intelligence.
The Inter-personal intelligence
Gardner writes:
“ The core capacity here is the ability to notice and make distinctions among other individuals and, in particular, among their moods, temperaments, motivations and intentions. Examined in its most elementary form, the interpersonal intelligence entails the capacity of the young child to discriminate among the individuals around him and to detect their various moods…….We see highly
developed forms of interpersonal intelligence in political and religious leaders ( a Mahatma Ghandi ), in skilled parents and teachers, and in individuals enrolled in the helping professions, be they therapists, counselors or shamans.”
The Logical mathematical intelligence
Einstein, whom his maths teachers berated for day-dreaming in class, wrote this about himself:
“ I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialities, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us. In physics, however, I soon learnt to sort out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.”
To my mind the above paragraph is a clear example of the logical-mathematical intelligence at work.
Einstein uses few words to express large ideas with sharp clarity.
The Linguistic Intelligence
“ By writing I was existing….my pen raced away so fast that often my wrists ached. I would throw the filled notebooks to the floor, I would eventually forget about them, they would disappear……
I wrote in order to write. I didn’t regret; had I been read, I would have tried to please. I would have become a wonder again. Being clandestine I was true”. In adulthood, Jean Paul Sartre wrote these lines about himself at the age of nine, and in them he describes one aspect of the linguistic intelligence, an intelligence that is intensely concerned with form.
Can I invite you do a small experiment?
Look and listen to these sentences and see how much or how little you enjoy them:
he’s got this brilliant book on the brain
she has a right to have forgotten things
he wrote these lines about himself at the age of nine
Marjorie gazed at Nigel with nothing on.
If you are switched into your linguistic intelligence, then ambiguity and a tricky relationship between signifier and signified is exciting. You will chortle over a misprint like univerity for university.
If you are thinking in a logical-mathematical mode then this formal stuff may well seem trivial and absurd.
The Musical intelligence
The following lines are taken from the M.I. Bill of Rights, and they express a bit of what a very musically bright person may feel in a modern language class:
I want to find tunes for parts of each unit
I have a right to use my walkman in the reading and writing parts of the lesson
Can we do more jazz chants?
I want to sing the grammar
I have a right to music that relaxes me
I need music that expresses my moods
I have a right to music to make the language work less heavy.
To be away from the world of beat, rhythm, tone, pitch and volume and directionality of sound for long, is tedious for a person with a well- developed musical intelligence.
The Spatial intelligence
Imagine yourself standing outside a large building, a theatre, a swimming pool, a mosque, or a gym hall you know well. Notice the relationship between this building and the space round it. Now mentally enter the building. Shut your eyes. Stand still once you are in there and notice what you can hear, notice the feeling of the space round you, the temperature and the dryness or dampness of the place. Now open your eyes and notice the lines, the light and the shadow.
If you were able to follow the above instructions easily and pleasurably, it seems as though your spatial intelligence is in good fettle.
Language uses spatial thinking when it describes time and other concepts in terms of space, eg:
within three days / as long as you…./ beyond the pale/ under pain of death etc..
In fact it is arguable that space is the main metaphor area “wired into” language to explain a wide range of abstract concepts. (See Lakov’s work on the metaphorical meaning of “up” and “down”).
You expect architects, air traffic controllers, sculptors, landscape gardeners and civil engineers to have highly developed spatial awareness, as is clearly the case with Henry Moore:
“ He thinks of the sculpture, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand; he mentally visualises a complete form from all around itself; he knows, while he looks at one side, what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realises its volume, the space that the shape displaces in the air.”
The kinesthetic-bodily intelligence
Have you ever seen an Arab horseman on his mount, where man and beast look like one animal?
The rider is in total bodily harmony with his horse.
Have you ever seen a l0 year-old perform an Aikido “katta” of 50-60 movements with crisp precision, smooth flow and not a single hesitation?
Gardner suggests that “ characteristic of this intelligence is the ability to use one’s body in highly differentiated and skilled ways, for expressive as well as goal-directed purposes: these we see as Marcel Marceau, the mime, pretends to run, climb or prop up a heavy suitcase. Characteristic as well is the capacity to work skilfully with objects both those that involve the fine motor movements of one’s fingers and hands and those that exploit gross motor movements of the body.”
Since the 1986 appearance of Frames of Mind, Gardner has gone on to propose two more intelligences, the natural intelligence and the spiritual intelligence.
The first of these two has to do with being in harmony with Nature in the way that many early peoples were and are. Perhaps you have friends who know what should be done next in a garden and then go and quietly do it? A half instinctive, half knowledge-based awareness of when to water and when not to water, when to manure, when to weed and when to leave in peace, all of these have to do with the natural intelligence.
I do not have the spiritual intelligence clear enough in my own mind to be able to explain it to you, gentle reader.
When you reflect on the wealth of thinking experience outlined in the last three pages then the standard, reductionist intelligence tests look pretty naive. Yet in some places they still hold political and institutional sway.
This article hopes to take its very small place in the struggle to get the many intelligences valued in society and in school. We have focused in on our mutual area of special interest: the language classroom.
Section 2 The theory of Multiple Intelligences
Some readers of Section 1 may have been unsatisfied by the simple assertion that this or that set of behaviours and skills constitute “an intelligence” without any attempt to define what “an intelligence” might be.
What, for instance, can be done to evaluate claims that there is a “cooking”, a “golf-playing”, a “survival”, or a “metaphorical” intelligence?
Howard Gardner proposes a number of criteria that would qualify a set of behaviours and skills to be classified as a full-blown intelligence. Here are some of them:
1. Brain damage may isolate a given intelligence or spare it, while destroying elsewhere
We can speak of an intelligence being independent of other parts of the thinking apparatus, if a stroke or an accident knocks out other parts of the brain-mind and leave it relatively intact. Independent existence of an intelligence is also demonstrated if the neural infrastructure of one intelligence is destroyed leaving the rest of the brain unharmed.
For example, damage to the motor cortex of the brain may leave a person paralysed thus knocking out their capacity to express their body-kinaesthetic intelligence, while leaving the rest of the brain’s thinking neurology still functioning.
2. Each intelligence should have its prodigies and/or “idiots savants”
An “idiot savant” is a person who is precocious in one area but an idiot in everything else.
The existence of such people shows that a given intelligence can operate to a high level and autonomously from the others.
In the case described by Lorna Selfe in her book ‘Nadia, A case of extraordinary drawing ability in an autistic child’, we see a child with a highly developed spatial intelligence but a severe inability to be with other people, or a serious deficit in her interpersonal intelligence. Nadia started drawing horses at three and a half, horses that looked like the work of a teenage artist.
“ …she had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows and a sense of perspective such as the most gifted normal child might develop at three times her age.”
Bruno Bettelheim describes the case of Joey, the ‘Mechanical Boy’, whose one interest was in machines. He took them apart and put them together again and actually wanted to become a machine.
When he came in for a meal “ he lay down an imaginary wire and connected himself to his source of electrical power. This imaginary electrical connection he had to establish before he could eat, because only the current ran his ingestive apparatus. “
Joey lived entirely in his brilliant kinaesthetic world of machines, but had to come to work with Bettelheim because he was undeveloped in every other area.
The case of Christopher, a linguistic idiot savant, is of particular interest, as it shows both the workings and the limitations of the language intelligence. On a variety of logical mathematical tests, Christopher scored between 40 and 75 (where the average score was 100) . At the age of 20, his ability to draw people was about that of a six year-old. Tests showed that he little notion of what was going on inside other people’s minds: he and a five-year-old were shown one of her dolls hidden under the cushion of a settee. The girl was led out of the room and the doll was now hidden behind a curtain. When Christopher was asked where she was likely to look for the doll, he suggested she would choose the new hiding place.
But in the language area Christopher was prodigiously able; He had some knowledge of these tongues:
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Modern Greek
Hindi
Italian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Welsh.
He can learn from pretty well any source, a teach-yourself book, a grammar book, a native-speaking informant etc…
He is happy with word games in any language he knows, so when asked to come up with as many words as he could from the German word REGENSCHIRM, he produced MEIN, SCHNEE, REGEN, SCHIRM and ICH.
He did ten “bird” anagrams (DIREE CUDK = EIDER DUCK) in 2 minutes 30 seconds.
Christopher’s case, documented in The Mind of a Savant by Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, is particularly interesting in showing how limited the language intelligence is on its own, without any power in other thought areas. Christopher was given a text in English to translate into three other languages. He did the task fast and “linguistically” well, but completely failed to notice that the original was syntactically fractured and did not make sense. Any person operating logically would have declared the task impossible.
3. An intelligence will have a core set of operations
These core operations will be triggered by stimuli coming in from the outside or the inside at a certain point in the person’s development. An example of this would be initial sensitivity to pitch relations, given that dealing with pitch is one of the core functions of the musical
intelligence.
Another example of a core operation would be the ability to imitate body movement, which is one of the core operations in the case of the kinaesthetic intelligence.
4. An intelligence will have a developmental process or history.
The intelligence will develop in identifiable steps as the person goes from birth to adulthood.
There may well be critical periods during which development speeds up.
If the right stimuli are absent during such periods, then the development may be stunted.
5. An intelligence will tend to be encodable in a symbolic system
Drawing serves as a notational system for the spatial intelligence. Music can be written on the page and has given rise to several notational systems.
The linguistic intelligence expresses itself in language which has a primary and a secondary form:
Of the seven intelligences Gardner proposed in his 1986 book, only the intra-personal and the interpersonal intelligences are impossible to encode in a symbolic system.
Though the above list of criteria for an intelligence is not a complete one, enough has been said to give some idea of how Gardner defines an “intelligence”. As neurology invents better and better tools for tracking what is going on in the brain, we are likely to get more and more evidence as to how the each of the intelligences functions chemically and electrically.
Though it is useful for clarity to speak of different intelligences, in daily life we frequently use more than one intelligence simultaneously. When a person sits down to send a friend an e-mail, they are in their intra-personal mode, given that their addressee is not there with them, and yet they are probably thinking about the other person’s state of mind which involves them in interpersonal thinking. The words they key in spring from their linguistic intelligence, and, in so far as the e-mail is rational and logical, that intelligence is involved too.
My own feeling is that a person is always either in an intra-personal or inter-personal mode.
To use older psychological words, you are either in an introverted mood or an extroverted one.
To use NLP terms, you are either in down time or up time. If you are humming a tune to yourself as you walk alone along a path, you are using both your intra-personal and your musical intelligences. If you are humming a tune you know annoys your partner and s/he is there, then you are in your interpersonal and musical intelligences.
It seems to me that the two “personal” intelligences provide the matrix or womb within which the other more technical ones function. These two seem to be of a different order.
Section 3 Multiple Intelligences in your classroom
I assume that you are a good teacher otherwise you would not have chosen to read this article!
If you are a good subject teacher you may well love the subject. Perhaps you began to have positive feelings about the language you now teach right back when you were a child. You started feeling you understood what this language stuff was about, while some of your classmates came out of such classes with blank faces and blank minds. Perhaps you began getting good marks in this subject and this led to positive parental reactions.
Your love of the subject is huge ‘plus’ in your teaching of it. Your enthusiasm will fire a number of the students in your class, and they will be warmed by your love for the language and its culture.
You may even inspire a small number of your students to follow in your footsteps and , in so doing, you are fulfilling one of the major roles of the teacher, the inspirational one. Inspiring the few is a gift possessed by a good number of teachers, but where does that leave the majority of the students?
Your love of the subject can also be a huge ‘minus’ in your teaching of it. To some students, your understanding of language and enthusiasm for it may seem alien, distant and off-putting, especially if they are weak in the linguistic intelligence. They simply wonder what you are on about, how you can rave over the this boring, formal, senseless encoding work.
It seems that about 1 in 5 language teachers were good at maths when they were at school. 4 out of 5 were poor at maths and did not really feel confident in the maths class. How about you?
If you belonged to the 4/5ths, what did you feel about your maths teachers’ weird enthusiasm for that incomprehensible subject? It is likely to have had a less than inspirational effect on you.
Had the 4/5ths who were poor at maths had a teacher like Mark Wahl, who loved his subject sufficiently to want to make it attainable and available to people who were weak logically-mathematically, but who were rich in other intelligences , then maybe the subject would have opened to them. Here is what Wahl says in his book Maths for Humans about the way he helped a visually-spatially intelligent second-grade girl to take her first, stumbling steps towards coping with arithmetic:
“ I asked her to make a picture incorporating 8+7 = 15, and to do this on a large index card. I asked her to paint four more cards with other maths facts on them. When she came back each card was a painting in which could be discerned the symbols of a maths equation, creating the outline of trees, person, beach towels etc.
I looked at her first card and asked her,
“ How much is 8 + 7 ?”
Silence. Then I said,
“ It’s the beach scene,” and she immediately said
“15”
She ended with a deck of artistic flash cards that soon created answer associations for her without me having to provide scene cues. My logical-
mathematical intelligence could never figure out how her mind did this, but there was no need to - she was successful with her facts and her math performance took off, thanks to her spatial intelligence.”
This teacher loved his maths enough to teach it in an un-mathematical way to a 7 year-old whose intellectual power was stronger in another intelligence.
Teaching language “ non-linguistically”.
The language prodigy and “idiot savant”, Christopher , introduced in Section 2, used to have conversations like this with his teacher:
La escribió Jorge a Juan ( in Spanish: Jorge wrote it to Juan )
Teacher: Can you drop “Jorge”?
Christopher: Not in English, but in Greek and Spanish.
T : In other languages?
Ch : Italian.
T : Berber?
Ch : That as well.
T : French?
Ch : No.
Pedagogically, a language prodigy like Christopher is of little interest or challenge to his teacher. These people suck the language up, however well or badly they are taught.
The real challenge are the learners who feel that learning a foreign language is outlandish, and that their language teacher is a sort of extraterrestrial.
This is the case of a boy, masterfully observed by Michael Grinder and described in his Righting the educational conveyor belt :
“ JLS is the kind of kid who gets up to sharpen an ink pen, just to move. JLS doesn’t raise his hand and wait for me to get to him; he reaches out and grabs me by the wrist, the shirt, the skirt (sic), whatever he can. Whenever I am reading directions he never looks at me. He touches the words on the worksheet or in the book.”
From this brief description it is clear that JLS lives almost entirely through his kinaesthetic intelligence. He has to hold, touch and do; to understand anything, he must be part of the action. Language only begins to make sense to him when he becomes a part of it, when the teacher adapts the subject
to his learning need:
“ JLS could not learn grammar until I made him into different parts of speech and parts of the sentence and let him and his classmates be the sentence and feel what it was like to be a verb placed either before the subject or after it. JLS liked to be action verbs or conjunctions. He really got into “connecting” two other people (parts of speech) together.”
The above exercise could well seem goofy, inelegant and circuitous to the good language learner, just as designing “equation pictures” will seem
bizarre and mathematically tasteless to the subject-expert person. At first it can be hard for the subject-focused teacher to “sacrifice” her subject in order to reach into the mind of an “ill-tuned” student, but our contention is that both Mark Wahl and JLS’ teacher showed the ultimate respect for their subject by their determination to have it reach into the mind of each person in their classroom.
Another example of teaching a topic multi-intelligently is a technique we learnt from staff at the University of the First Age, a Multiple Intelligences inspired project in Birmingham, UK.
The topic to be taught was punctuation and the target group were people of 13 years old.
The teacher split them into groups of six, and gave each group a reading passage. In each group one learner read the passage, pausing at each punctuation mark, while the other five made a noise to represent it, e.g.:
Reader: The girl looked down, (group noise representing comma)
“(noise representing inverted commas) I love you, (comma noise)” (inverted comma noise) etc……
This activity helps children realise that punctuation is something more than arbitrary salt and pepper on the page, and it does this by appealing to the musical, kinaesthetic, and interpersonal intelligences.
This is much more effective than long teacher explanations about the function of each punctuation mark.
A second exercise that focuses on punctuation and appeals to the students’ interpersonal intelligence is when the students are asked to write to each other in role as punctuation marks. For instance, let’s say I decide to write to my friend, Herbert Puchta; I think I would classify him as an inverted comma, so my letter might start….
“ Dear “,
I am writing to congratulate you on the number of people you have helped to speak in English, in your own place, Austria, and many other places. It is amazing how, while saying nothing, the “ frees a flood of words from other people’s mouths…..”
No, the above is not a crazy exercise. Try it with a warmed up, intermediate class of late teenagers or adults, and you will see for yourself. What students are doing as they write these letters is first expressing new things about their classmate via the metaphor of the punctuation mark, and ,secondly, doing some in-depth exploration of how they understand and use this punctuation mark. (for a fuller outline of the activity, see Letters, Burbridge et al, OUP).
“ But I guess I’ve been using multiple intelligences in my teaching for years”
You are absolutely right, and you are right in two distinct ways:
A. You have been offering multiple intelligence stimuli to the students.
For example, when a teacher gets students doing the Maley and Duff
hotel receptionist exercise (published in 1978) in which a volunteer
mimes a sentence that the class have to guess and have to recreate word-
for-word accurately, the appeal is equally aimed at the kinaesthetic and
linguistic intelligences.
B. Quite independently of your intentions, your students have been freely using their intelligences in multiple ways in your classes. It is vital not to confuse the offering of a stimulus in one intelligence with the hugely varied ways in which the students process the stimulus.
Here’s an experiment.
How do you process this sentence?
The vast plain stretched away into the distance.
If you are in the spatial bit of your head, you could get an overall picture which may well include spatial features not in the sentence above.
If you are in the musical bit of your thinking, you may hear a piece of music that, for you, evokes a vast, open area.
If you are in your interpersonal place, you may find yourself listening to a friend telling you about a flat, open area.
If you are in your kinaesthetic self, you may feel the heat as you trudge across the endless plain.
If you are in your intrapersonal mode, you may feel the empty plain to be just the place you would love to be, far away from the hubbub of people.
If you are cruising your logical-mathematical brain circuits, you may be thinking about the cause-and-effect relationship between the glaciation in the last Ice Age and the plain before you.
If you are in your linguistic being, you may be thinking and about a language in which the sentence word order would become “plain vast distance into away (past marker) + stretch”, and feeling you like this better
than the English order.
To any reasonable person, the trigger sentence above lies in the spatial world, but there is no way of knowing through which intelligence or intelligences the reader will process the content. What you can be virtually certain of is that in class of 30, whatever the stimulus, all the intelligences will be firing across the group.
Even if you give students what you reasonably regard as a highly musical exercise, they will instinctively process it their own sweet way/ways.
Here’s the exercise:
the students stand up and spread around all the space available, so they
have plenty room round them. They shut their eyes. They then imagine a great orchestra in front of them, and they become the conductor. They lead the orchestra through a three-minute snatch of music.
If they don’t like classical music ask them to choose to be a band leader, a pop star or whatever.
We have had feedback from this exercise which, when summarised, goes like this:
In this article, we invite you to consider your students’ differing intelligences.
You can be sure that many of them will instinctively process your teaching, activities, information in intelligences you could not predict.
We are not foolish enough to predict what will actually happen in your class.
To get the full juice out of activities done in class, and to give you an idea of the intelligences at work in your groups, it is well worth your allowing time for the students to tell each other about their own processes, as with the apparently “musical” exercise above.
Mario Rinvolucri, 2001.
Herbert Puchta (see back editions) and Mario Rinvolucri will shortly be bringing out a publication on Multiple Intelligences in the Language Classroom.
Mario also edits a ‘web-zine’, which you can find at http://www.hltmag.co.uk/index.htm
