Pedagogical Possibilities for ICT

Appealing to both sensory and symbolic smarts

It is widely accepted today that it is not enough for students to understand and learn fragmented information. It is equally important for students to understand the context, meaning, and gestalt of topics as well. The objective, sterile environment in many schools actually inhibits learning. Learning is also unlikely to occur when students harbour negative feelings about an instructor, peers, class work, or have difficult personal issues. The traditional classroom must be replaced by rich, stimulating, accepting, warm, and responsive surroundings. Sylvia Farnham-Diggory agrees:

"Both children and adults acquire knowledge from active participation in holistic, complex, meaningful environments organized around longterm goals. Fractionated instruction maximizes forgetting, inattention, and passivity. Today’s school programs could hardly have been better designed to prevent a child’s natural learning system from operating." (Farnham-Diggory 1990)

As most teachers know, students labeled weak or slow often turn out to be bright and skilful when confronted with something that is personally appealing or challenging outside the classroom. Though these students have difficulty learning in school, they often excel at making, fixing and operating tangible things: gadgets, bicycles, motors, electrical circuits, complex mechanical devices, arcade games, VCRs, various kinds of contraptions and even imaginary objects. These children are usually identified as having trouble with the symbolic smarts that form the core of schooling.

It is not surprising that the traditional school focuses on what weak students cannot do, and does not see them as possessing virtuoso sensory smarts in some fields. Instead, it sees them as failing to perform, or not meeting the requirements. An ideal teacher will appeal equally to symbolic and sensory smart students with a view to bringing these two kinds of knowledge into active and fruitful collaboration.

For example, a computer with a Logo environment and LEGO extensions allows students to build working systems out of tangible blocks, using their hands as well as their theoretical mind, in the form of symbolic expressions on the monitor screen. When students are encouraged by teachers to reflect on and confront the differences and similarities that emerge as they move across materials, sensory modalities, and kinds of descriptions, it helps them to create mental bridges between action knowledge and symbolic knowledge. Previously hidden aspects of hands-on constructions are revealed. Children who build both real world and virtual world structures begin to see the resemblance among working systems. In making the resemblance explicit, they liberate and make easily understandable the basic principles that the working systems share. (Resnick 1997)

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