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From: Tim on 22 Aug 2008 08:25
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine-that/200808/thinkering




We argued in our previous blog that kinesthetic feelings and visual
images precede symbolic expression of knowledge. Physicist Michael
Faraday exemplifies this pattern perfectly and helps us to understand
the results of Jeanne Bamberger's educational experiments in hands-on
instruction with school children.

Michael Faraday may not be a household name, but he should be. Every
time you use an electrical device, you are indebted to Faraday. Faraday
invented the first electric motor and the first electricity generator.
And he discovered many of the fundamental principles governing the
physics of electricity - all without a bit of mathematical training.

Faraday was Britain's Edison. Like Edison, he had almost no formal
schooling, though he read voraciously. Like Edison, he learned a trade
as an apprentice. And like Edison, he loved to tinker. His skills
brought him to the attention of the greatest chemist of the day, Sir
Humphrey Davy, who hired him first as a secretary, then as an
experimental assistant and valet, and finally as a fellow researcher. As
far as we can determine, Faraday never wrote an equation in his life,
but that didn't keep him from making revolutionary breakthroughs.

One of Faraday's most far reaching insights, summarized as �Faraday's
Law', states that a changing magnetic field produces an electrical
current -- no mathematics involved. Faraday's law was subsequently
mathematized, however, by Faraday's younger colleague, the Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell. That formulation is what appears in
today's textbooks - as one of Maxwell's equations. Nevertheless,
Faraday's physical insight clearly preceded any attempt to translate it
into mathematical symbols.

Even Maxwell, fluent as he was in mathematics, much preferred the kind
of experimental demonstrations at which Faraday excelled. "For the sake
of persons of different types," he wrote, "scientific truth should be
presented in different forms and should be regarded as equally
scientific, whether it appears in the robust form and vivid colouring of
a physical illustration, or in the ... paleness of a symbolic
expression" (Rukeyser, 1942, p. 439). As this passage suggests, Maxwell
was at heart, like Faraday, a �thinkerer'.

�Thinkering' is a word that the writer Michael Ondaatje coined in his
novel The English Patient to express the genesis of concepts in the mind
while tinkering with the hands. Much has been written about the human
hand and how its use effects the brain, language and culture (see Frank
R. Wilson's The Hand, 1998). What we want to point out here is that the
physical manipulation of things, like direct personal experience of any
kind, generates sensory images of all sorts and thus enables thought.
Hands-on tinkering leads to minds-on thinkering. Bodily engagement with
nature teaches much more than any amount of words or numbers in science
books. Doing produces a personal understanding that symbols simply can't.

Herein lies an educational dilemma. Partly out of necessity, partly out
of naivete, we teach the principles in words and symbols before we teach
the bodily-kinesthetic and imagistic thinkering that underlies them. And
we've reaped the consequences.

These consequences have been well documented by Jeanne Bamberger in her
studies of Cambridge, MA school children. In one of her educational
experiments, Bamberger studied students who did poorly on tests but were
identified by their teachers as having "virtuoso" ability to build and
fix things. Bamberger documented that these students had difficulties
learning disembodied principles of science presented in mathematical and
verbal formulations. When asked to build a mobile, however, these
"academically challenged" students were stellar performers. They
intuitively knew how the principle involved in balancing levers works in
real life. One compared it to balancing a teeter-totter. But these
students had difficulties translating their insights into formal
symbols. In other words, they functioned like Einstein, Faraday, and Edison.

Ironically, Bamberger also documented the fact that many of the
academically gifted students and most of the teachers could state in
words or numbers the principle that governs the building of a successful
mobile: the length of the �arm' on either side of the fulcrum or balance
point times the weight attached to each �arm' must be equal. But few of
these students. or even the teachers. could actually build a mobile!
They were just as �handicapped' as the "academically challenged"
students, but in an inverse manner.


How much better it would be for everyone if education involved students
(and teachers!) in feeing how things work by actually making things work
AND ALSO translating their intuitions into formal symbol systems such as
words or numbers. Only when tinkering, thinkering, and thinking are all
integrated will students be able to back-translate words and numbers
into kinesthetic feelings and sensory images so they can implement them
in concrete forms such as electric motors and mobiles. After all, it's
only in light of hands-on experiences that Faraday's law, Maxwell's
equations, or E = mc2 can make any useful sense!

REFERENCES

Bamberger, Jeanne. 1991. "The Laboratory for Making Things." In D.
Schon, ed., The Reflective Turn: Case Studies in and on Educational
Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

IIT Institute of Design "Thinkering Spaces" Project websites:
http://www.id.iit.edu/705/ and http://www.thinkeringspace.org
From: nigel on 22 Aug 2008 08:32
x-no-archive: yes

On Aug 22, 1:25 pm, Tim <tim...(a)letterboxes.org> wrote:
> http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine-that/200808/thinkering

> How much better it would be for everyone if education involved students
> (and teachers!) in feeing

Very nulab, they love charging fees for education :)

Evil Nigel


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