Thinking with things

It has been nearly three years since I stepped away from teaching high school history, and while there is a lot I don’t miss about that job (like grading), I am still fascinated by pedagogy.  Thankfully, I have a few craft teaching gigs that scratch that itch, and one in particular has me really excited.  Hopefully, if we can fill a class, I will lead an afterschool slöjd class/“Carving Club” for third through fifth graders starting this March.  In preparation for this, I have rationalized that I must read up on educational slöjd and the history of teaching handicrafts.  And so my book pile is growing as I bounce from one read to another.

A lot of what I am reading has me thinking about my former profession in a new light.  The subjects that I taught, primarily U.S. History-related, were pretty cerebral.  I spent a lot of time weaving details together into a tapestry of intersecting stories that, I hoped, helped explain past and current events.  But the craft education that I am engaged in now has students “thinking about things” less and “thinking with things” more.  It is not that we only “thought about things” in my former classrooms. We certainly thought with things, like textbooks and notes, artifacts, and primary-source materials.  But in the craft classroom, there is a level of bodily engagement, reliance on senses, and manipulation of tools and materials that feels very different from the way I used to teach.  What are the best ways to teach a manual task, and what are the cognitive benefits of learning through one’s body?

Sarah Kuhn, in her book Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction, makes the case that thinking is “embodied,” and that the western/Cartesian mind/body split undermines learning.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, she argues that our bodies are the means through which our brains perceive the world, that sense perception and cognition are so intimately related that they are hard to tease apart, and that engaging our senses and most importantly manipulating things are central to learning.   While this may seem obvious, it is also clear that our classrooms and our pedagogy have become increasingly focused on rationalism and have lost touch with embodied thinking.  Our classrooms are laid out like sensory-deprivation chambers and our students are told to sit still in orderly rows and not to fidget.  If learning is “embodied,” isn’t such a classroom culture depriving students of learning?  How much of the recent explosion in ADHD diagnosis among our students is the result of better diagnostic tools and a greater sensitivity to neurodivergence, and how much is a result of frustrated educators medicating students so that they better fit the old classroom culture?  I don’t have answers for this, but it does make me excited to teach educational slöjd because that system is very much about “embodied” learning.

It is strange to me that today’s educational system has lost sight of notions like “embodied learning,” “tangible instruction,” and “thinking with things.”  There is a long history in western thought about the importance of learning through the senses.  Aristotle challenged Plato’s rationalism when he asserted that by trusting what our senses tell us we can understand our world and build knowledge.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century followed suit, arguing that “our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes.  To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own” (39).  John Dewey and other Progressive educators of the early twentieth century made the point that it is only through experience and active exploration, what he called inquiry, that people learn.  This inquiry is the “conversation between a person’s interior states and the external circumstances in which she finds herself” (25).  Despite this rich tradition, Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” mind/body split nonsense seems to have won the day, and our classrooms and our teachers regularly treat kids like disembodied brains, whose bodies' only purpose is to get them to and from school.

A case in point that proves how much we have suppressed embodied learning is Kindergarten.  Invented in Germany by Fredrick Froebel in the mid-nineteenth century and introduced in the US by German immigrants, it was founded on the notion that education occurred through play and that by structuring such play one could accelerate understanding.  Up until about the 1910s and 20s, Kindergarten involved teachers giving students a series of “gifts,” —balls, dice, cylinders, blocks, etc…— and assigning a sequence of tasks that would encourage children to explore patterns, shapes, and symmetry, and thereby support the development of inquiry and experimentation.  Along with singing and gardening, this system of structured play would stimulate sensorimotor development and encourage children to build understanding through interacting with their environment.  The Kindergarten classrooms of today retain almost none of their original pedagogy, such that we now only consider Kindergarten as the grade before first.  But Americans did experience many decades of this type of education, and I can’t help but wonder what impact on cognitive and personal growth such a classroom might have.  Anecdotally, from these classrooms came the likes of Piet Mondrian, the founders of Bauhaus, and other modernists who explored a new geometrical aesthetic, as well as Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright who brought us geodesic domes and geometric architecture.  Fuller and Wright both spoke about how central playing with blocks was to their intellectual growth.  Even Robert J. Oppenheimer, a product of a related pedagogical system, described his three passions when he was ten to twelve years old: “minerals, writing poems and reading, and building with blocks still—architecture” (48).  What thinking skills and cognitive patterns have our students lost as we turned away from tangible instruction?

And so, I am enjoying wading into course design again.  What carving projects and skills will I teach, and in what sequence will I teach them, so that students build the dexterity and strength to handle a slöjd knife?  How will I break complex tasks into elemental steps in a way that helps students develop that faculty in themselves?  How will I create a classroom culture that values self-reliance, grit, creativity, love for work, neatness, and most of all, fun?