The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive — An Interview with Author Thomas Armstrong

Hi, I'm Kathleen Burke, Director of ASCD's Annual Conference. Welcome to ASCD's Annual Conference Online 2003.

We are pleased to present a series of online programs that will preview topics and highlights of the 2003 Annual Conference. Joining us now is Thomas Armstrong, author of numerous books, including his most recent ASCD book The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive.

Thomas, what motivated you to write this latest book?

Actually, I got excited about writing the book from my own experience of reading. About five or six years ago, I started reading again really for the first time since college, and just began reading so many of the great books by James Joyce and Whitman, Virginia Woolf. I just kept reading and getting more hungry to read, and I realized that this was something that I wanted to share with other people, and since I was an educator, am an educator, I really wanted to help kids acquire reading and writing capabilities so that they could get that good stuff too. And then also, I’ve been involved with Multiple Intelligences for the past 15 or 16 years, and we have always been putting reading and writing in the linguistic category, and I realized that reading and writing embraces all of the intelligences and that, in fact, if you really want to teach kids effectively, you’ve got to reach all of the intelligences as a primary way to help kids learn to read and write.

So really it was out of my personal experience of loving to read and write, and also my professional experience of wanting to bring multiple intelligences into the fore to really support the literacy movement, that caused me to write the book.

How does this book fit in with the recent “No Child Left Behind Act” and the reading first initiatives?

I wrote this book basically to try to bring together a lot of different strands and movements in reading research over the past many years. I know that in today’s educational climate, the momentum has shifted towards phonics, towards phonemic awareness, towards research-based reading in line with the “No Child Left Behind” and literacy initiatives, and I certainly address that a great deal in the book. In fact, it’s real exciting to think about phonemic awareness and teaching kids the 44 phonetic sounds through the multiple intelligences, through gestures — you know, 44 gestures for each, one for each of the phonetic sounds, 44 graphical symbols. There are a lot of creative ways that often aren’t really incorporated into some of these new phonics and phonemic awareness programs, and I think multiple intelligences has a great deal to offer.

But that’s only part of the story. I think that a lot of what’s been researched in the past in terms of whole language kinds of issues, in terms of Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics, in terms of even the old whole word approach to learning to read, are all sort of pieces of the puzzle. I call this the “literacy lion.” I compare it sometimes to the image of the blind man and the elephant, where each of the blind men has a piece of the puzzle. And I think in the same way I talk about the blind educators and the literacy lion, where each individual group seems to feel that it has a truth on how to teach reading and writing.

My sense is that there are so many different avenues to approach reading and writing. Some of them are being addressed in the government initiatives, and some of them are not. And frankly, I hope that my book will serve as a kind of bringing together of people of diverse groups. I think these reading wars that have been going on for the last few decades are kind of ridiculous and that we all need to rally around what works, what practically helps kids to read. And my book provides as many tools as possible, and also kind of the underlying theory to help understand why different approaches work for certain students and not for others, and why reading and writing is a tremendously complicated and also individuated kind of experience. Each kid’s brain is wired in a very different way, and consequently reading and writing need to be approached with that student or that child in various ways, through differentiated instruction and through multiple intelligences.

What do you plan to share with participants during your session at the ASCD Annual Conference?

My workshop at the ASCD conference is to provide an opportunity for participants to really experience the multiple intelligences of literacy. I’m going to provide some experiences of interaction with different kinds of texts, so that the participants can understand that text, even though text represents a linguistic symbol system, how text is related to visual spatial imagery. No text exists in a social vacuum so we’ll look at the social context of text, its interpersonal connections. We’ll look at how text has feeling connected with it, or should have feeling to be effectively taught in teaching reading to kids. We’ll look at how text has a musical quality. We’ll really look at the connections between text and all of the areas of the intelligences that Dr. Howard Gardener has talked about in his model. And we’ll relate it to the brain, because some of the interesting new brain research that’s come out has indicated that there are many other areas involved in the processing of reading and writing that haven’t really been focused on so much in the research that we see coming out in the headlines — right hemispheric involvement in reading, for example, kids with labels of learning disability who pay more attention to anxiety-laden words, words that have feeling content than words that have no context at all.

Then we’re also going to look very practically at how to help them understand, or how to help educators understand that books are not simply linguistic, that we should choose and help kids, provide kids with books that involve something else, some other intelligence. You know, popup books, and touch-and feel-books, and books with little keyboards in them so that kids are involved with music, game board books that kids can play together and read in a social context so that all the intelligences are involved in the process of literacy. So we’ll hope to do a lot of that over the course of two hours and really get a sense of how literacy is a whole brain experience. And literacy is something that if we are going to teach it effectively we’re going to have to reach as many different parts of the brain and as many different parts of each individual as possible.

Thank you, Thomas, and thanks to our Internet audience for tuning in to one of a series of online programs previewing ASCD's 2003 Annual Conference in San Francisco.

Check back this time next week when we will post another interview with an nnual Conference invited speaker.

Before you leave this site, take a few minutes to visit the ASCD Annual Conference web page for the latest conference updates. I'm Kathleen Burke.