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Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom

Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom Helen Sword On or about September 1997, I started teaching in color. With the painful clarity of a myopic donning a new pair of glasses, I realized that for years I had been confining my literature students to a black-and-white universe, a world composed entirely of words. Now I began to think outside the lingui-s tic square, opening my classroom to the visual arts, to music, to dance. With astonishment, I watched as my students metamorphosed from inert cocoons swathed by convention into innovative, articulate human beings. Pouring energies and talents I had never even suspected into acts of nonverbal liter- ary analysis, they emerged as sharper readers, clearer thinkers, and more dynamic and skillful writers. Paradoxically, their release from language freed them back into language. My conversion experience occurred, as paradigm shifts often do, in a classroom — but not my own. My eldest child had just started first grade, and I had been invited to attend “Meet the Teacher Night” at her elementary school. After a long day spent teaching in drab university lecture halls, enter - ing my daughter’s classroom was like stepping from a prison block http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy Duke University Press

Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom

Sword, Helen
Pedagogy , Volume 7 (2) – Apr 1, 2007
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Copyright
Duke University Press
ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-2006-032
Publisher site
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Abstract

Teaching in Color: Multiple Intelligences in the Literature Classroom Helen Sword On or about September 1997, I started teaching in color. With the painful clarity of a myopic donning a new pair of glasses, I realized that for years I had been confining my literature students to a black-and-white universe, a world composed entirely of words. Now I began to think outside the lingui-s tic square, opening my classroom to the visual arts, to music, to dance. With astonishment, I watched as my students metamorphosed from inert cocoons swathed by convention into innovative, articulate human beings. Pouring energies and talents I had never even suspected into acts of nonverbal liter- ary analysis, they emerged as sharper readers, clearer thinkers, and more dynamic and skillful writers. Paradoxically, their release from language freed them back into language. My conversion experience occurred, as paradigm shifts often do, in a classroom — but not my own. My eldest child had just started first grade, and I had been invited to attend “Meet the Teacher Night” at her elementary school. After a long day spent teaching in drab university lecture halls, enter - ing my daughter’s classroom was like stepping from a prison block

Journal

Pedagogy – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2007

References