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Those students who exhibit the canonical (in our terms “scholastic”) mind are credited with understanding, even when real understanding is limited or absent; many people — including at times the author of this book and his daughter — can pass the test but fail other, perhaps more appropriate and more probing measures of understanding. Less happily, many who are capable of exhibiting significant understanding appear deficient, simply because they cannot readily traffic in the commonly accepted coin of the educational realm. — Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind.
Using Multiple Intelligences
Howard Gardner is a cognitive psychologist who has deeply investigated how we learn and solve problems. He is perhaps best known for his development of multiple intelligence theory. In a nutshell, multiple intelligence theory is a way of understanding and organizing the different human aptitudes that mirrors what we know about the neurological organization of the human brain. Much of this knowledge originally came from studying infant development and the dysfunctions produced by localized brain traumas. Lately, new imaging techniques have also allowed mapping localized changes in brain activity with specific cognitive efforts. Recent advances in cognitive science, developmental psychology, and neuroscience suggest that each person's level of intelligence is actually made up of independent faculties that can work individually or in concert with other faculties. In his pioneering work “Frames of Mind”, Gardner (1983) has identified seven such faculties or “intelligences”: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (i.e. to know oneself). More recently, he has added an eighth, naturalist, intelligence to the list.
There are several facets of multiple intelligence theory that are important to teaching, learning, and applying the many different modalities of bodywork. First, we need to realize that people inevitably differ in their relative strengths in these multiple aptitudes. This affects how each person uses and combines their different abilities to learn and to perform tasks. Our individual strength in each area depends on both our inherent abilities and our prior background. Even with our strong cultural bias towards the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences, we vary greatly in the extent to which our individual and family histories have prompted us to develop each intelligence. A second facet is, even given inherent and childhood differences, we can increase our aptitude in an area by attention and practice. In “7 Kinds of Smart”, Thomas Armstrong (1993) provides both a good overview of multiple intelligence theory and numerous exercises to assess and increase facility in the different intelligences. Again, the intuitive becomes the learnable.
A final facet is that, partly because the different intelligences are independent, whatever we choose as a focus for massage education and competency assessment will ultimately act as a filter. We will attract and produce therapists whose abilities best match what we explicitly value in our assessments. Massage is a discipline in which bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences have traditionally been extremely important. We must explicitly continue to stress the importance of these traditional elements as we also focus increasingly on details of therapeutic technique and physiology.
Given the breadth of abilities for which we are asking, it is foreseeable that students starting massage training will enter with greatly varying patterns of multiple intelligence development. It is our responsibility to see that they leave with a usable balance of skills from the broad set of multiple intelligences used in massage therapy. It is also our responsibility to see that our competency assessment protocols are flexible enough to accommodate the differing styles of learning and expression that are implicit in this diversity. In “The Unschooled Mind”, Howard Gardner (1991) stresses these points.
Studies of cognition suggest that there exist many different ways of acquiring and representing knowledge; these individual differences need to be taken into account in our pedagogy as well as in our assessments. Sometimes students who cannot pass muster on the usual measures of competence reveal significant mastery and understanding when these have been elicited in a different, more appropriate way.
Changing Naive Scripts and Maps of Knowledge
Cognitive research has highlighted a further educational obstacle that can foil a massage therapist from effectively making use of the techniques that they have studied. Many inquiries have revealed that successfully learning to pass tests and competency exams is different from gaining an understanding of the underlying principles taught. Nor is such learning equivalent to developing a functional and flexible ability to use the information studied. To expand on this problem, we will make a side-trip to the educational research of physicists Frederick Reif and Edward Redish. The motivation for this side-trip again comes from Howard Gardner (1991). “The evidence in the venerable subject of physics is perhaps the ‘smoking gun’ but, as I document in later chapters, essentially the same situation has been encountered in every scholastic domain in which inquiries have been conducted”.
Frederick Reif is a professor with the Center for Innovation in Learning and the Departments of Physics and Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. His work during the last several years has focused on two central questions: “(1) Can one better understand the underlying thought processes enabling people to deal effectively with complex domains such as science or mathematics? (2) Can one use the resulting understanding to design instruction whereby students may learn such thought processes and acquire flexibly usable scientific knowledge”? From his inquiries, Reif (1991, 1995) has identified several common problems in teaching and learning technical subjects.
First, students come into the classroom with naive preexisting notions about the world that are often both incorrect and inconsistent. These preexisting models are remarkably resistant to change. According to Reif, instruction must first overcome these naive models and then proceed to teach students how to properly interpret relevant concepts and principles, how to describe knowledge effectively, and how to organize it effectively. Only with these three basics in place, can education proceed to teach students how to analyze problems, construct solutions, and check their solutions for consistency against known facts. The latter skills are exactly those needed in massage therapy to assess a client's symptoms and perform functional tests and to develop a therapy protocol and monitor its effectiveness.
Reif notes, in particular, problems with students' internal organization of information. “Students' acquired scientific knowledge is often quite incoherent. Like much of everyday knowledge, it tends to be fragmented, consisting of separate knowledge elements that can often not be inferred from each other or from other knowledge”. To help overcome organization problems, Reif recommends teaching students hierarchical (tree-shaped) information organization. He explains, “Organizing a substantial body of knowledge effectively is not an easy task and beyond the capabilities of most inexperienced students. However, instruction can at least try to insure (a) that students acquire knowledge which is in well-organized hierarchical form, and (b) that they can exploit such organization to help them remember and retrieve pertinent information”.
Reif stresses presenting basic definitions and principles that can be systematically elaborated rather than spewing out facts for memorization. If you are a bodyworker who understands shoulder motions and attachments, for example, it is easier to deduce that the teres major is an internal rotator than to remember that fact from an unorganized mass of information about the upper body. Reif warns, however, that, “Presenting knowledge in well-organized form is useful, but totally insufficient. The more important, and far more difficult, requirement is to ensure that the knowledge in student's heads is well organized. To this end, students must actively practice using well-organized knowledge”.
Edward Redish is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland in College Park. Since 1982 he has been actively involved in the subject of physics education with the computer. He was founder and co-principal investigator of the Maryland University Project in Physics Education and Technology (MUPPET) and Comprehensive Unified Physics Learning Environment (CUPLE). His current research effort is devoted entirely to physics education. He has noted (Redish, 1994) four major principles of technical education: “(1) People tend to organize their experiences and observations into patterns or mental models; (2) It is reasonably easy to learn something that matches or extends an existing mental model; (3) It is very difficult to change an established mental model substantially; (4) Since each individual constructs his or her own mental ecology, different students have different mental models for physical phenomena and different mental models for learning”.
From these basic principles, Redish draws a several corollaries. He states, “We usually assume that our students either know something or they do not. The views of mental models we learn from cognitive scholars suggest otherwise. It suggests that students may hold contradictory elements in their minds without being aware that they contradict”. He continues, “Mental models must be built. People learn better by doing than by watching something being done”. Redish also notes that new learning is linked to the familiar. “Much of our learning is done by analogy”, he says.
Returning to the more general orientation of Howard Gardner (1991), we discover the same themes. Gardner asks, “What is going on here? Why are students not mastering what they ought to be learning? It is my belief that, until recently, those of us involved in education have not appreciated the strength of the initial conceptions, stereotypes, and ‘scripts’ that students bring to their school learning nor the difficulty of refashioning or eradicating them. We have failed to appreciate that in nearly every student there is a five-year-old ‘unschooled’ mind struggling to get out and express itself”. In an interesting shift of focus, Gardner (1995) also claims that successfully appealing to this same unschooled mind, present in all of us, is a major trait of those who are able to become effective leaders beyond the confines of narrow disciplines. This, I believe, is another indication of the large scope of these learning concepts. Gardner (1991) also leaves us with his view of the product of successful education; someone who has managed to bridge the gaps to become a disciplinary expert. Someone, who is, says Gardner, “an individual of any age who has mastered the concepts and skills of a discipline or domain and can apply such knowledge appropriately in new situations”.
Applying Cognitive Results to Massage Therapy Training and Application
Returning our focus specifically to massage therapy, what have we learned from our trip through cognitive science that illuminates our abilities to effectively learn and apply bodywork concepts and techniques? We now understand that teaching and learning are not fixed targets. Effective learning depends on tailoring education to match the variations in individual learning styles. For massage therapy this is particularly an issue because we place high value on multiple intelligences beyond our culturally dominant verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical modes. We especially need to avoid filtering out those with aptitudes for the body-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal modes. As psychologist and Aikido practitioner Richard Strozzi Heckler (1993) comments:
Our educational system, in elevating the brain to command control, has promoted cognitive knowing to the neglect of our deeper knowings. What our society has called teaching is really indoctrination. True learning, receiving the transmission of experience, happens at a level much deeper than cognition. It is in the experience of the lived body that we have the opportunity to contact and learn from the process of being alive.
We have learned that presenting or memorizing mounds of unstructured techniques and anatomical details will not convey the underlying concepts necessary to flexibly use our knowledge in real life situations. Knowing, for example, the locations and attachments of many muscles does us little good in assessing an injury unless we also understand the concepts that connect this knowledge with active and passive testing of movements at specific joints. We have increased our understanding that learning or teaching new problem solving skills requires both learning new models and learning when not to apply our earlier, less specific knowledge from everyday life. Once again, the track towards mastery becomes less shrouded by fog as we journey to our next stop.
© Keith Eric Grant — The RamblemuseSM, November 1999. All rights reserved.
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