Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction

The Case for Thinking With Things

Sarah Kuhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000403459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction offers a transformative, student-centered approach to higher education pedagogy that integrates embodied cognition into classroom practice. Evidence across disciplines makes clear that people learn with their bodies as well as their brains, but no previous book has provided evidence-based guidance for adopting and refining its practice in colleges and universities. Collecting findings from cognitive science, educational neuroscience, learning theories, and beyond, this volume's unique approach—radical yet practical, effective yet low-cost—will have profound implications for higher education faculty and administrators engaged in teaching and learning. Seven concise chapters explore how physical objects, hands-on making, active construction, and other elements of body and environment can enhance comprehension, memory, and individual and collaborative learning.

1
Unnatural Acts: The Problem With What We Do Now

I’d like to invite you into a classroom, a typical room at my typical university. I’ve been teaching for more than 25 years and have used scores of different classrooms around our campus; almost all of them are like the one I’m about to show you.

Your first impression will be of beige. Beige chairs with a single broad arm for notebooks, all facing the teacher’s spot at the front of the room. Beige tile flooring, beige walls with nothing much on them except the requisite whiteboard on one wall—or two walls if I am lucky. A wooden podium in front has a bunch of electronic gear so I can show PowerPoint slides, or an image from the web, or a video on the white pull down screen. Even the digital projector fastened to the ceiling is tan against the off-white acoustical tile. There are green trees outside the window, but the beige blinds are usually pulled down so that I can use the projector without competition from daylight.

The classroom I’ve described is so common on campuses today that it hardly rates a mention. It’s standard issue, and so is the way of teaching that it supports. Almost any student in America, walking into this room, will immediately know what is expected of them: sit down, take out your notebook, and wait for the professor to begin. Likewise, this room tells me, the professor, what is expected of me. I am to be the center of attention, up front at my podium, and all the learning that happens in this space will be dispensed by me. The tools I have at my disposal are a whiteboard and a computer for projecting images. The students have their notebooks. Why would we need anything more?

Figure 1.1 One of many similar classrooms to which the author has been assigned.

Over my three decades of teaching, this standard arrangement, which I once took for granted, has come to seem to me deeply problematic. It’s not that students don’t learn in these classrooms—they do—but they often learn in spite of, not because of, the standard arrangement. It’s as if we were asking them to go into battle with (almost literally, as I shall show) their hands tied.

Like most new professors, I started my teaching career with little teaching experience and completely unaware of the research on what works to promote learning in college students. I made many, many mistakes. I also learned from some of those mistakes, and from students, colleagues, and staff at my university, and began to try new ways of approaching lessons. Emboldened by a semester I spent observing a studio classroom in a school of architecture, I introduced small hands-on exercises in my social science classes. The first time I brought a bucket of Lego bricks to my undergraduates, they were both thrilled and baffled. I asked them to make a quick “sketch model” of an environmentally sustainable community—that week’s subject—by arranging the Lego pieces on a tabletop in the classroom. The students’ alert engagement, their happy conversation as they used the Lego, their interesting accounts of what they had chosen to build, and their clear inability to apply any of the lessons of sustainability I’d been trying to teach them, all set me upon a path of inquiry that continues to this day.

My Lego experience led to many other uses of hands-on materials in the classroom: having students, on the first day of class, spend five minutes building a Lego structure that expresses something about how they like to learn; using poster paper to have groups of students make and present quick in-class posters about a topic related to that week’s subject matter; using Tinkertoys to create collaborative “concept maps” that reveal the relationships within a set of ideas; and modeling the structures of the brain with clay to bring the image off the page and into three dimensions. These and other forays into terrain far beyond the standard model of classroom behavior have been a wonderful adventure for me and (for the most part) for my students. The success and the pure fun of these adventures led me to create a “studio classroom” for myself and my colleagues, full of hands-on materials and resources.

The studio classroom began a decade-and-a-half ago when, with support from the university, I converted a derelict storage room into a teaching space with work tables, craft materials, simple electronics, project storage, networked computers, and a few other resources. When I teach in this space, students are more engaged and relaxed. Student reflections written at the end of a semester in the studio classroom reflect this and its positive impact on learning:

I liked the hands on learning approach. It breaks up the constant barrage of regular classes. It did meet my learning needs because I learn better through hands on.

I do not learn well in a lecture structured course. I work better with my hands and physically seeing and doing what we are discussing…. Not only did you teach us about the information, we then got to physically do some kind of activity to help really understand what we were being taught.

This class used various different teaching methods and I thought that this variety was very successful and helped me greatly in learning the materials…. I liked this because it is something that is not usual in classrooms but I know it helped me and I think it helped other students to learn because the atmosphere was more relaxed.

I definitely did not expect that on the first day of class we would be tying knots, or that our first homework assignment would be to learn to crochet, but it was a great experience nonetheless…. I have never taken a class with so much hands-on learning, or student centered teaching…. One of the things I liked best about this course was the room in which the course took place … it felt like a little learning community.

The way for me to learn is to interact. I tend to fall asleep if I am just listening or watching so it helped me stay interested in the class. The course could be improved if it also tended to our taste as well. Just kidding.

I am confident in saying that I will retain more information from this class than any other class I took this semester.

While these students were particularly articulate, their comments are representative of the feedback I got every semester. It’s responses like these that made me realize that my hands-on, thinking-with-things approach spoke to students in a deep and resonant way that was important to pursue. Ultimately, it was the reactions of students, and the satisfaction and pleasure I found in the new studio classroom, that led me to write this book.

What happens in my new classroom is far enough from the mainstream that I now begin each semester by talking explicitly with my students about my approach and its rationale. On the first day of class, I pass out a list I call “Five Myths About Learning in College.” I want them to understand why I do the unconventional things that I do, and to know that this will not be the passive classroom they may have expected.

Five Myths About Learning in College

• Myth 1: Learning takes place inside our heads, so the rest of our body should remain still except to take notes.
• Myth 2: College learning is about learning facts, and all you need to learn facts is lectures and textbooks.
• Myth 3: “Experiential Learning” requires going off campus—to study abroad, do service learning, or do a co-op placement.
• Myth 4: College students are abstract thinkers and have no problem learning new things when they are presented abstractly.
• Myth 5: If you have trouble learning in college it means there is something wrong with you.

In the pages that follow, I will address these myths and many other assumptions, spoken and unspoken, that guide most pedagogy in higher education today. By presenting evidence from research and from my own experience and that of others who teach college students, I hope to convince you, the reader, to replace these myths with a more effective, generative set of beliefs grounded in how we truly learn.

Coming Attractions

As a preview of coming attractions, here is a brief sketch of the ground I will cover in the upcoming chapters of this book:

A foundational assumption of conventional approaches to college teaching is the distinction between mind and body, evident in such phrases as “the life of the mind”—the promotion of which is the presumptive focus of the university. Going back at least to the 17th century philosopher Descartes, the mind/body distinction has guided approaches to learning in Western thought. As a result, although institutions of higher education may offer athletic and exercise programs, they are extra-curricular, and the focus is on the development of students’ minds, thought to be synonymous with the contents of their heads.

Thanks to the work of psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and others, one of the key things we now know about human learning is that it is embodied; that is, that our hands, our bodies, our sense of ourselves in space and in motion, all play an important and inadequately understood role not only in our learning, but also in our thinking. This is the subject of Chapter 2, “The Embodied Learner.” Drawing on the work of philosopher John Dewey, psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and others, the compelling case for embodied cognition is laid out.

Embodied learning also means that, as John Dewey argued in the first half of the 20th century, all learning is also experiential: where good and deep learning are present, they grow from experience and action. In higher education, the term “experiential learning” is generally used to refer to programs that take students out into the “real world” for activities like study abroad, internships or co-ops, and service-learning. I argue that the distinction between classroom learning and experiential learning is like the distinction between mind and body, which Dewey also challenged. Both of these dichotomies are harmful and problematic, and showing this is the work of this chapter.

Chapter 3, “Thinking with Things,” shows that not only are cognition and learning not confined to the contents of the skull, but also that our bodies and our environment become “things to think with” that enhance comprehension, learning, and memory. Much of the chapter is an extended discussion of an historical case: the Froebel Kindergarten, which became widespread throughout Europe and North America in the second half of the 19th century. Key to the Froebel Kindergarten was a carefully designed set of manipulatives to be used by children as they created patterns of nature, science, and art. After a discussion of the Froebel approach and materials, the chapter goes on to argue for the deep impact that the system had on the adult work of modern artists (including Klee, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Albers, Braque, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright) and modern scientists (Richard Feynman, Buckminster Fuller, and brothers J. Robert and Frank Oppenheimer) in the first half of the 20th century.

Chapter 4, “How Things Shape Our Thinking,” builds on the single example of the Kindergarten materials by enumerating a host of ways in which things influence and support our thinking. Beginning with the role objects play in long-term memory, as well as the way in which they support memory during work-in-progress, we then turn to the ways in which things aid categorization, support spatial reasoning, are key to interaction and inquiry, and evoke emotion. Things are foundational to meaning making and to metaphor, as well as being present, in real or imagined form, in the work of scientists and artists.

In social settings, both those of collaborative work and those of instruction, things play a role. In instruction, physical materials can aid tutoring by shaping the student experience, providing shared metaphors, and making the thinking of the learner visible to the instructor. In collaborative settings, like most workplaces, administrative “things” like standardized forms and large information systems also shape thought and action.

Chapter 5, “Abstraction Reconsidered,” tackles a central assumption underlying pedagogy at the university level: that we are primarily teaching abstractions to students who are developmentally ready for abstract thinking. Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and other fields, this chapter challenges this point of view, which stems in part from a misreading of the seminal work of Jean Piaget. The conventional wisdom is that humans move through a developmental sequence as they age, progressing from the very concrete to the abstract, and that by the age of 18 or so, learners have become abstract thinkers. In fact, Piaget believed that the road to abstract thinking is not a single path, but that students’ ability to think abstractly is domain dependent, and develops with experience. An individual learner’s evolution from concrete to abstract thinker, I argue, is not the evolution from child to adult, but the development from novice to expert that can happen at any time once the basic cognitive prerequisites have been met. Real facility with abstractions, I speculate, may in fact be a process of “concretion,” bringing abstractions closer to the self.

In Chapter 6, “Embodiment Revisited”, we return to embodied cognition and look closely at the hand as a very special case of embodied cognition and learning. Although the manual is devalued in higher education, we reinforce this value hierarchy at our peril. Starting with a discussion of the physiology of the mind-hand system, the chapter continues with a look at the wide variety of ways that the hand participates in cognition, starting with the senses and continuing with finger counting and other embodied practices of memory and learning. Low cognitive load manual activity also aids attention and reduces distraction, and physical materials have the potential to assist learning in those for whom it is especially difficult.

One of the most poignant results of our erroneous approach to college learning is that we call upon students to perform unnatural acts. Many students, through long practice, are able to get good and even excellent grades in this environment. Others suffer, enduring academic failure and reinforcing a poor self-image, because they have difficulty acting unnaturally. These students we label “disabled” and send them to receive special services and incremental accommodations that are supposed to lessen the impact of their defects. If, as many in the disability rights community argue, “disability” is a mismatch between person and environment, we are systematically creating disability in the standard-issue classroom. When, for example, we relegate the hand solely to note taking, we handicap students by removing a principal instrument of human experience and learning.

Chapter 7, “A Vibrant Learning Ecosystem,” lays out a vision for a new way of teaching in the university. Acknowledging that all students are embodied learners, and that we can and should build our classrooms and pedagogy around this ground truth, I make a series of proposals for classroom design, curriculum and instructional approaches, and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Unnatural Acts: The Problem With What We Do Now
• Interlude A: The Crocheted Hyperbolic Plane
• 2 The Embodied Learner: Thinking With the Whole Self
• Interlude B: Molecular Models
• 3 Thinking With Things
• Interlude C: Diagrams
• 4 How Things Shape Our Thinking
• Interlude D: Qualitative Research Software
• 5 Abstraction Reconsidered
• Interlude E: Designing the Future World
• 6 Embodiment Revisited
• Interlude F: The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design
• 7 A Vibrant Learning Ecosystem
• Index