Words Come Alive: The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing

Presenter: Thomas Armstrong, Cloverdale, CA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part One

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Basically, what I am here to do is to talk about making the words come alive. Actually, they cut off of the "making the," so it was just "words come alive" but, in fact, this is actually the title in reverse of the new ASCD book which is coming out next month called "The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making The Words Come Alive."

How many people here are either regular or premium or comprehensive members of ASCD?

[A show of hands]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Most of you. Okay, so most of you will get a copy of this book next month. That kind of makes it easy.

What I want to do is give you kind of a preview of what is in the book. Of course, I will not simply talk about what is in the book; I will spin out as I am wont to do, especially since I am jetlagged from Japan.

But I do have a lot of material that I want to pack into the next two hours. And even though it says it is going to be 15 percent interactive and 85 percent lecture, I think it is going to turn out to be more like 50/50 or something like that. Because you know how they ask you to do these workshops like in 1973, and then finally today comes. And your life has changed and you have gone through things, so I have been developing the workshop as I have gone along. So there is more interactivity than the workshop indicated. So, if you are disappointed and you expected a huge amount of lecture, this would be a good point to leave.

Let me explain, to begin with, why I decided to write this book. This is actually my fifth book on multiple intelligences, and I am focusing here on the skills of literacy. Why did I write this book? Well, actually, there was a personal reason and there was a professional reason. The personal reason was, about six or seven years ago, I saw this movie called "Looking For Richard" that Al Pacino did. How many people saw that movie, by the way?

[A show of hands]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Okay, a great movie. I tell you, it was a turning point movie in my life. It really was. And it was kind of strange because it was a movie that got me started to read again. And what this is all about is it's sort of a documentary about Al Pacino's efforts to put on a performance of "Richard III" by Shakespeare. So, in that, you get his meeting with the actors, discussing the play, doing readings. He goes out into the public. He talks with people about what they know about Shakespeare. You see cuts of the rehearsals. It is fascinating.

And what it did was it turned me on to Shakespeare, and I started to read again. I started with Shakespeare. Well, I read "Richard III." I read these Folger, the little Folger, mass market kind of Shakespeares, which I love, because they have the text on the right side and all the stuff you cannot understand on the left side. And most of the Shakespeare books have the stuff you cannot understand at the bottom, and so you have to go up and down and up and down. And I would get headaches from that. And I can do right left, right left. Probably crossing the midline had something to do with it, too, so I can integrate the information better.

But, at any rate, I really got excited about Shakespeare, and so I devoured most of Shakespeare. And then I kind of got a little systematic and I started back with the pre-Socratics, and I started reading philosophy and Plato and "The Republic" and "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and then I just kept on going, through the Romans and the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. And I just kept reading and reading and reading. I used to watch TV for about two hours, maybe three hours, before I would go to bed, and I realized, if you just read an hour a day before you go to bed, over a period of a few years you can read an incredible amount of stuff.

I am still hungry to learn and to read. Right now, I just got back from Japan, so I have been reading a lot of Japanese literature. And some of that is going to kind of seep into the presentation, because I have included some excerpts from some Japanese literature.

So, I got really excited about reading. And, of course, I am a writer, and so reading and writing, these are the things I love to do. So, I figured, heck, from a personal point of view, I wanted to share my love of reading and writing, my love of literateness — if that is even a word. The nice thing is language is always changing and we can change it, too. I wanted to share that.

I am an educator. I have been working on multiple intelligences, and I thought, well, it is really important to learn how to read and write. That gets me into the professional thing. Because in terms of the professional thing, I have been writing books about multiple intelligences and telling teachers for the last 16 years about all the wonderful intelligences and experiencing them all, and how we should help kids get information by singing it and by acting it out and that kind of thing and really honoring all the intelligences.

And I still believe that with every fiber of my being, but there has always been, for the last 16 years, there has always been this contradiction in my professional work. And it started really early. And it would come out like this: "Dr. Armstrong, you say the multiple intelligences are really good, but right now you are lecturing to us." "Dr. Armstrong, you know, multiple intelligences, you say it involves all the intelligences, but isn't Frames of Mind what started it off?" "Yes." "Isn't Frames of Mind a book?" "Yes." "Isn't that linguistic?" "Yes."

So, I think back now and I think, what if Dr. Gardner, instead of writing Frames of Mind had done a tap dance of the multiple intelligences? Or what if he had written a song or what if he had come up with a mathematical formula, would anybody would have been able to figure it out? He wrote a book, and the book had a huge impact.

Then I started to think about it and I started to look historically back and I began to realize that people who are good at words have the power in any society, almost invariably. You can go way back to Egyptian times, even the word papyrus, from which we get the word paper, means "of the king" or "from the king." Every king or every huge, powerful individual had their scribes and the scribes had this sort of holy sacredness about them. That is where the power was where the word was.

And so I was always having to deal with this contradiction that, yes, the multiple intelligences are important, but, yes, it is true, the linguistic seems to be the most important one, whether we like it or not. And to give our kids the gift of reading and writing is to empower them in a way that we may not empower them simply to teach them to be good singers, to be good dancers and so forth.

Now, I hope you do not get mad at me if you are multiple intelligences and say, Dr. Armstrong, are you leaving the fold now and abandoning us to the Bush Administration's accountability formulas? And I want to assure you that I am not. It is just that I am really excited about reading and writing and literacy.

And now I realize that, first of all, just from a real basic point of view, it is sort of a reconceptualization of looking at word smart in relationship to these others. Because when we talk about reading and writing — and I do this all the time myself when I am doing my presentations — I will get to word smart and I will say, this is the intelligence of reading and writing. And it is not. It is not. Reading and writing uses all the intelligences, and that was really kind of the revelation for me. I mean, it was not really a revelation, because anybody who kind of really delves into multiple intelligences would realize that anything involves all the intelligences.

Gardner even says it in the book Frames of Mind. He says that these individual intelligences are fictions, but in the real world they are always kind of interacting. And of course, the same is true of reading and writing.

But since I was getting excited about reading and writing myself, I spent some time looking into this. And it became more and more relevant to me the connections that reading and writing make with the other intelligences. And in fact, it occurred to me that we cannot teach reading and writing effectively unless we make connections to the other intelligences.

That is another thing that I have seen for the last 30 years as an educator is that when reading and writing is taught, it is taught mainly through reading and writing, through linguistic approaches. It is through worksheets and texts — usually pretty boring text — and lecture and questions and answers, and all that kind of stuff. And it does not go very deep.

Words, even though they are symbol systems are in linguistic intelligence, everything we do with our brain involves taking those symbol systems and working with them through all the intelligences. So, that is kind of what I want to get into in this presentation.

What we are going to do is we are going to go through the different intelligences and we are going to see the kind of connections that exist between each intelligence and reading and writing. And I will start out each intelligence with kind of a little interactive experience just to give us a little sense of what we are getting into.

And then I want to talk a little bit about the brain, because the neat thing about it is reading and writing is a whole brain activity. A lot of people are used to thinking about reading and writing as involving just a few structures in the left hemisphere and that is pretty much it. It is pretty hardwired in there. But, in fact, the more research and more research we are getting, and a lot of the stuff that I have included in my new book, includes some stuff that has just come out in the last three years about reading and writing's connection to the different intelligences. So, I am really kind of excited about presenting some of this stuff.

Although it is probably nothing new. A lot of what you are going to hear is nothing new. It is just that we are going to organize in a way that makes sense in terms of how reading and writing can be taught more effectively.

After I talk a little bit about the brain, I may talk a little about the connections of reading and writing in history to this particular intelligence. Then I am going to get into some specific strategies. In fact, the way that I have written the book is a lot of strategies interposed with the theory. And I have gone from a micro to a macro level. In other words, I started at the phoneme level, and I have gone from phonemes to words, words to sentences, sentences to text, text to whole books, and whole books to general learning styles, or literacy styles as I call them, so that we can how we can apply this sort of multiple intelligence approach to literacy on any level.

We could do phonics seven or eight different ways. Phonics is really popular right now. In some places, you cannot teach without using phonics and you have to use certain kinds of research-based phonics programs. Well, this will hopefully put some light on those. But also I think we need to go up the hierarchy, and in each significantly higher level of meaning in structure we will be able to see the applications of multiple intelligences to reading and writing.

So, this is not just kind of beginning reading and writing stuff. This is stuff that can be applied — I put at the K-12 level — but a lot of the stuff that I am going to include can be used at the college and postgraduate level as well. I would say pre-K to postgraduate level, or to adult learning, just the whole gamut. So, I hope that people here will walk away with some practical things and maybe some new connections made between MI and literacy.

So, we are going to start with body smart or bodily kinesthetic intelligence. I would like you to all stand up if you would for a minute.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Now I am going to put some text onto the screen and what I would like you to do simply is to respond to the text.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Thank you very much. You may sit down.

This is not a personal comment on you. Let me just go back to that slide. The important thing is this word jumps. It is just text. It is just symbol. Like I said, it is a linguistic set of symbols. And yet, look what it did in terms of our motor abilities. It caused us to do probably several million things with our bodies.

And I would like to suggest that words have muscle. Words have muscle. I want you to think about that. You can even write it down. Words have muscle. Kids learn this very early in life. Somehow they learn that when they say a word like "up" there is magical quality about "up." They say "up," and then their whole motor universe changes and they get swept up, this kind of physical sensation, and they learn about the physical power of words.

Later and later in life, of course, we forget about that deep connection. But there are a lot of interesting connections. Some people suggest that language itself evolved from gestures, both in our early state as Homo sapiens and in early primate behavior. In fact, when you start looking at the brain, there are some interesting things. If you look at Broca's area, which is an extremely significant area for reading and writing, for syntax, for grammar, among other things, in monkeys, this area, an analogous area, F-5, is associated with intentional physical movements.

And in fact, I have a slide right here. Signing is another aspect. When I first heard about signing in my early days of multiple intelligences, I thought, oh, yes, signing that is spatial and kinesthetic. And that is wrong. Signing is actually very highly linguistic. People who have damage in the linguistic areas of the brain, such as Broca's area, have significant difficulty learning signing. And so there is this intimate connection between the motor coordination and the linguistic abilities.

In fact, there is a wonderful book that kind of opened me up to this called Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks. If you want to read great brain research, start with Oliver Sacks. He is the most marvelous. He is a neurologist. He writes about real people. He writes about the complexities and case studies of individuals with unique kinds of neurological situations.

At any rate, in "Seeing Voices," he gets into the whole deaf community. He talks about the research of Ursula Bellugi at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. She was one of the first people to really recognize and work with some of these connections between signing and linguistic intelligence.

Another really interesting area related to not just bodily kinesthetic intelligence and linguistic intelligence but also many of the intelligences is the angular gyrus. Now this is an important area where a lot of meanings and sensory data is coordinated. This is actually otherwise called the association cortex, where the temporal lobe comes together with the parietal lobe and the occipital lobe, and information of a visual, kinesthetic, auditory nature, all kind of get synthesized and integrated. So, this is a really multiple intelligences area, where more kinesthetic information gets kicked into the system.

Also, the motor cortex is a very important part of the whole reading and writing process, particularly in terms of when we are speaking the words, when we are writing the words, we are using are motor cortex. And then, finally, the cerebellum now we are realizing has some linguistic capabilities. We used to think that the cerebellum was pretty much a sensory motor kind of thing. In fact, when you saw that word "jump" and you jumped, it was your cerebellum that was organizing things for you.

The cerebellum is this actually highly abstract motor entity that tells us to do this and do that and move this way and move that way, and then to do it all in coordination with each other. So, it is actually the motor cortex that carries out the specific actions but it is the cerebellum that coordinates a lot of this on a very abstract motor level.

Some of the recent research of Sally Shaywitz and others at Yale and elsewhere have indicated the connections. In fact, Ursula Bellugi was also another person who saw some of those connections between the cerebellum and language function. And I have some of those recent studies cited in the book, where the cerebellum in terms of all kind of complex motor activities are connected both with the eye movements involved in reading and also with some of the kinesthetic sensations that people experience while they are reading.

It is interesting that people who go up into space, when they have been weightless for a while, there is some research from NASA suggesting that when they come back down they experience some mild dyslexia for a while. So, there may have been some kind of disruption at the cerebellum level. Anyway, there is some really interesting stuff related to the brain and the body that I think people have not really talked in detail about before.

Also, historically, reading and writing were much more physical than they are today. In the Middle Ages, reading in fact used to be prescribed as a physical activity along, with hiking and weight lifting or whatever they had back then. Well, actually, one thought I had was it was because the books were so heavy back then and you had to carry them around.

But actually, reading was a tactile experience. People touched the words as they read them. We talked about reading text, and we have the word "texture." "Texture" is a tactile kind of feeling. So, if you look at the etymology, those connections between touching and reading are back there in our language, but we have sort of forgotten about them along the way.

Let's look quickly at some strategies, starting at the very sound level, at the phonemic level. It has always struck me as odd that nobody — unless you can tell me about this, I have seen programs that have kind of gone part way in creating linkages between the phonemes and gestures. I think there is Zoo Phonics and there are some other programs like that. But I have never seen a program that has taken all the 44 odd phonemes of the English language and created a gesture for each one. So, there is challenge for somebody who is doing their master's thesis or doctoral dissertation or just wants to try something new. Just take the 44 phonemes, and if you want to do it with your kids, create some gestures that link each one.

We will just do a couple. I am going to make these up. There is nothing sacred or holy about them. Although there is this guy called Rudolph Steiner — well, maybe he is the guy who did it — Rudolph Steiner actually created a system called eurhythmy, where at least some of the consonants and vowels were connected to gestures. And he developed a whole system of dance, where people would dance text in terms of the consonants and vowels. In your handouts I have actually listed a book that you can read a little bit about his work in that area.

So, maybe Steiner did it, but Steiner, let's be honest, was really out there on the fringe metaphysically. So, I would like to see somebody in the educational world do just a really nice sound job and a good study that we could do. But we will just have a little experience of this. We will work with the "oo" and the "e" sounds. Just for the sake of coming up with some gestures, why don't we do, for the "oo" sound, we will do "oooo," "oooo." All together, say it and do it at the same time. "Oooo."

Now "e" will be "eeee." "Eeeeee." Okay, let's do them. "Ooooo, eeeee, ooooo, eeeee."

Very good. Now, let's read some text. And as we read this text, any time we get to the "oo" phoneme, we will do that gesture. Any time we get to the "e" phoneme, we will do that gesture. So, read out aloud with me, please. Once upon a time, there were some little birds that were left in a nest. A cat started crawling up the "treeeee" to gobble them up. They got scared and cried "eeeee." There was an owl near by observing this and he screeched "hooooo." The parents of the birds heard the owl go "hooooo" and they came back and saved their little ones, who were so glad that they just kept chirping "eeeee, eeeee, eeeee," all day long.

You do not have to do all 44 phonemes to gestures, but if you are working with kids who have specific difficulties with certain phonemes, then work with them on specific gestures that they can link to those phonemes. Especially for kids who are liable to be labeled ADHD or one of America's newer learning diseases, this might be an effective approach.

Okay, words. Body spelling, something very simple but we could do this. I would like to invite you to do this. If you have anything on your laps, if you would just take it off for a moment. I am sorry for the people who thought this was going to be 85 percent lecture. Anyway, here we go. What we are going to do is we are going to stand up any time we say a vowel and we are going to sit down any time we say a consonant. We are going to spell this out loud and standing up on the vowels and sitting down on the consonants.

Ready, here we go. O-N-O-M-A-T-O-M-A-N-I-A. We caught some of you. It kind of helps you appreciate the vowel-consonant-vowel patterns here. By the way, I did not say what onomatomania is. If you should wake up in the middle of tonight in a cold sweat saying "onomatomania, onomatomania, I cannot get that word out of my mind," you actually have onomatomania. Because onomatomania is an obsession with the sounds of words. Anyway, going on.

Sentences. Let's say we are going to deal here with parallel construction. What I want you to do is, one of these sentences is in parallel construction, one of them is in non-parallel, or is not in parallel construction. And I want you to give me a sign. If it is in parallel construction, I want you to give me the touchdown sign, because that means are hands are in parallel. If it is not in parallel, I want you to give me the cross sign, not in parallel.

So, let's read this out loud and then we will do the sign. I acquired my considerable fortune by investing carefully, working hard and marrying rich a woman. Parallel construction.

Let's try the next one. I acquired my considerable fortune by investing carefully, hard work and marrying a rich woman. Not in parallel construction. That hard work is just sticking out there. I guess I made it a little easy for you by putting that in. Gee, I do not know why I did that. Anyway, going on.

Text. Again, we are going from micro to macro. One thing that we can do — and I do not think the teachers do enough of, they focus so much attention on visual imagery that they forget about all the kinesthetic imagery that is in text. And I turn to Shakespeare, because you can almost pick up anything in Shakespeare and find oodles and oodles of kinesthetic imagery. And here is just one that I picked at random: I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent but only vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls on the other side.

Every single line has kinesthetic imagery in it. And when you are working with kinesthetic imagery, one thing you can do is have kids get up and actually act out the kinesthetic imagery. You have a phrase in a story you are reading and it says something like the guy had a chip on his shoulder. Well, you get a little chip and put one on everybody's shoulder and have them walk around and experience what that metaphor actually means.

See, that brings the kinesthetic imagery out of the text, it gives us a chance to experience it, and then it goes back in the text, and now we have lived it. And the kids, especially their bodies, are now connecting with the text. Texture is happening with the text.

On a book level. When I say on a book level, I am thinking books traditionally we think of as linguistic, but they are not. Books often have pictures in them, which bring in the spatial dimension. And increasingly now there are more and more books that seem to come in some different kind of form that includes other intelligences. So, I am going to give you some examples of these as we go through the intelligences.

This is just one example. This is Juggling for the Complete Klutz." This book comes with the instructions, but it also comes with the balls to do the juggling. So, for the hands-on kid, you are giving me a book that I can actually use with my hands. That is an important connection to make. We are saying to kids who feel that words are kind of scary, hey, there is something for you here, too. Wow, I can juggle. And I start juggling. Maybe I will just start with the balls, but then I will realize, hey, I want to learn how to do this better. Then you get into the book.

So, putting the two together like that is very smart and not klutzy at all. In fact, I wish they would change their name. I did include their address if you are interested in their books. Because I am going to mention some more of their books later on, and they have lots and lots of books that make connections to the different intelligences.

On a literacy style level. Literacy style is just something I made up to kind of go along with learning style. And it just suggests that when we think about reading and writing, typically we think about the kid sitting in their seat reading a book or writing with the number two pencil — sitting quietly. That is a stereotype. There is absolutely no reason in the world why that has to be so, except that convention has made it so.

So, looking at literacy styles, we are going to look at kids who are bodily kinesthetic people. They move and they learn at the same time. So, the obvious implication would be to let them move while they are reading and writing. This is just a slide, I think taken from the Key School, which is one of the best known schools using multiple intelligences. And these kids are just calling their flash cards and reading them as they move along. But, of course, I like what different teachers have done with this in terms of like giving kids reading rocking chairs, for example, a wonderful way to move and read at the same time.

I understand that some exercise equipment — I use them all the time — exercise equipment comes with a little bookrack, so you can be doing the treadmill or any of the various things while you are reading and writing. Just simply reading a book and wandering is not a goofy idea. In fact, that is the way people used to read.

We talk about Aristotle. Well, boy, talk about stuffy. If anybody was quiet or sitting at their seat, studying for long periods of time, it must have been Aristotle, right? Wrong. Because in the Lyceum, his school, his school was known as the peripatetic school. And peripatetic means wandering around. His school was the wandering around school, because that is what they did. There was a courtyard and they would wander around. They would talk together. They would argue together. They would read together. This is the way that they learned.

So, why do we say now that, wow, sitting down is the most academic, rigorous way of learning if Aristotle learned in this other wandering around way. So, we should give our kids more slack and create environments. Back in the seventies, there used to be this program called Modern Reading, and it is not around anymore. I expect that it probably never would make it in today's conservative climate. But it was basically a hyperactive reading program for hyperactive kids that involved using comic books. Kids were able to lay down on pillows and move around, and no reading lesson lasted more than two minutes. It was a short attention span reading program. I see nothing like this around. If you see something like this, let me know so I can let people know in the future.

Let's go to picture smart. Again, I am going to give you something to do on the next slide. It will not involve moving but it will involve using your imagination.

[Pause]

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