Symphony was a familiar topic to me because of Dr. Unrath's
spring class; my group was assigned to cover the synthesizing mind, one of
Howard Gardner's five minds. The synthesizing mind and symphony are extremely
similar concepts. The goal being to, as Pink says, "put together the
pieces." Because I am posting this after the symphony group's lesson today
(Oops!), I was able to recognize the many similarities between the symphony
presentation given today and the synthesizing presentation that we gave our
students in the spring. We asked the class to take two random notecards (with
various random topics) and find the connection between the two, to find the
symphony that they create together. Today in class, we were asked to do the
same thing using various food items, peanuts, mints, cheez-its, very clever!
I even noticed that the symphony group had selected the same
TED talk on metaphor that we had shown during our presentation. Metaphor is
such a large part of using symphony and synthesis in thinking. Metaphor is a
big idea, and often used in art. I think I mentioned in class that I would like
to incorporate the big idea of metaphor at the Elementary level, inspired by
"mix your metaphors."
I found this quote to be very inspiring. “Many engineering
deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is
because perspective is more important than IQ. The ability to make big leaps of
thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. Usually
this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary
minds, and a broad spectrum of experiences.
After reading Gardner’s chapter on synthesis I remember him
suggesting that in the future we need more than minds that are genius in their
own field, but minds that can recognize the perspectives of others fields and
work together in a multi-disciplinary way.
This is no small task. But, I would like to point out that we often do
this is the art classroom. J
Asking our students to take big ideas from life experiences or content from
other classes and give these concepts meaning through art making. Art has the
potential to build a multi-disciplinary mind in our students, and a
multi-disciplinary mind will be a powerful resource in the future.
I also thought about your synthesizing presentation while reading the Symphony chapter! It is so true that in our art classrooms, we give our students many opportunities to do things in a multi-disciplinary manner, which will help them out in the future.
ReplyDeleteHaving a friend who teaches engineering, I often have conversations relating to creativity with her. I always find it intriguing how passionate she is to bring creative teaching into her college courses and how passionate she is that engineers HAVE to think creatively....yet those above her do not support any of these ideas. What would our future look like without people with the ability to think in both their left and right brain? Scary.
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