2. LEARNING STYLE ACCOMMODATIONS

2. I study clusters of related culture crud items to find diverse ways of appealing to people from different learning styles and/or cultural backgrounds. The more diverse ways that anyone uses to seek to capture the hearts and minds of others, the more hearts and minds are likely to be captured.

I’ve been a student of learning styles for over 10 years now. If I had to pick one academic subject that has MOST helped me understand myself and others, it’s this. Everyone has a unique combination of how they typically process information … and, as I discovered, one reason I have had a hard time finding where I fit in life is because my thinking processes are more complex than most people’s. Note: This is not about how SMART we are, but HOW we are smart, as my friend Dr. Kathy Koch of Celebrate Kids, Inc., says. And much else (if not all else) in life is influenced by the realities of learning styles! I learned the core material primarily through Dr. Kathy’s conferences. Her books, How am I Smart? A Parent’s Guide to Multiple Intelligences and Finding Authentic Hope and Wholeness have also been excellent resources.

Anyway, I have come to believe that learning styles are absolutely critical to discipling and mentoring others, as well as to validating people and helping them find their niche in life. However, my sense of training programs for Christian leaders is that studies of learning styles are almost universally absent from the curriculum. Or, if they are available, they tend to be in the “Christian education” degree programs. Also, to my knowledge in over 20 years of involvement at the periphery of Christian publishing, very few publishers of curricula for adults take learning styles into consideration. They are somewhat better when it comes to diverse means for presenting material to children and adolescents.

Basically, this means that our leaders and teachers have no formal training in either the necessities or the practicalities of adapting their communications for people who process information differently from themselves. And the curriculum products they may rely on for teaching don’t integrate “differentiated instruction” for people of providentially different learning styles. So – what makes us think we can become more “missional” in connecting with people in our communities when we don’t even know how to contextualize our messages for those on the inside?

While I do not have the time to cover here the material I teach on the subject of spiritual formation and learning styles, I will give a few basic thoughts and examples, and then suggest a practice exercise related to The Golden Compass.

A while back, I read that there were over 50 significant theories related to how people learn. Each focuses on a particular set of related issues, and the framework of categories created in response to those issues generally appears to be valid across generations, genders, and cultures. Here are just four such frameworks for learning.

How we remember

According to the Modality Model, developed by Barbe and Swassing, there are three ways we are created by God to remember what we experience: auditory, kinesthetic-tactile, and visual. Auditory learners remember best through things heard, especially what they say aloud themselves. Kinesthetic-tactile learners remember best through moving and touching. Visual learners remember best through things seen, whether actual in the material world or imaginary in their mind’s eye.

Sometimes we can accomplish the same overall task using any of the three. For instance, some people play piano “by ear” (auditory), others “by sight” (visual), and others “by touch” (kinesthetic – recollection of where arms and hands and fingers must be, in sequence, in order to play a piece). All people have all three modalities for remembering, but no one has exactly the same combination. We are a “providential package,” made in ways that amplify our learning for whatever purposes in life we pursue.

How we understand what we observe

According to the Cognitive Model, developed by Witkin, there are two ways God created us to understand what we experience: global and analytic. The global mind more easily captures the “big picture” or main idea in a set of data, but has trouble drawing in the details. The analytic mind more easily identifies the details in a set of data, but has trouble drawing out the main concept or theme.

People’s mode of understanding can be categorized on a spectrum – very global, to global, to analytic, to very analytic – and does not change over time. This is important to keep in mind, because it means that the more analytic people are, the more they will always have more difficulty “getting” the main idea from a set of details. Likewise, the more global people are, the more they will always have more trouble “getting” the details that make up the big picture. It’s not because we’re stupid that we just DON’T get it … it may be that we just CAN’T get it because of our cognitive style. Forest … trees … we need to accommodate both because God created both for a reason!

How we engage different parts of our brain for competencies

According to the Multiple Intelligences Model developed by Howard Gardner and later popularized by Thomas Armstrong, all people have more or less developed intelligences in all the “eight kinds of smart” that they have identified. To qualify, a proposed intelligence must be researched and pass three tests:

  1. Someone who previously had that intelligence/thinking ability to a very high level completely lost it due to a stroke, injury, or similar trauma to the brain.
  2. Someone who basically has that intelligence only, and manifested at a genius level of ability (i.e., an “autistic savant” – think the movie Rainman).
  3. People have historically been characterized as geniuses who have that ability at an ultra high level.

These eight multiple intelligence facets are: word smart, logic smart, picture smart, music smart, body smart, nature smart, people smart, and self smart. We each already have all eight intelligences, plus the capacity for developing a higher skill level in all eight. It is a matter of activating that part of the brain, and then continuing to train it for greater acuity. Normally, an adult will have about four or five intelligences very well developed, two or three slightly to moderately developed, and one or two pretty much dormant.

One major problem is that traditional IQ tests create a measurement based on only the first two kinds of smart: word smart and logic smart. (These same two types of “smart” are typically the only ones used in traditional church preaching and teaching! Which do you think show up more frequently in holistic or missional teaching and discipling?) Traditional communication approaches fail to recognize the variety of ways people are intelligent, and frequently invalidate the God-given abilities of the vast majority of people – including the other intelligences of those labeled with “high IQs” by the standard tests.

From Gossip to Games

There is much more that could be said about learning styles that becomes very relevant to studies in concrete media systems. However, I’ll end this section with a quote from a pastor-preacher-author from the last century, A.J. Gossip (1873-1954, and yes, “gossip” is his real last name – pass it on!).

A basic trouble is that most Churches limit themselves unnecessarily by addressing their message almost exclusively to those who are open to religious impression through the intellect, whereas … there are at least four other gateways – the emotions, the imagination, the aesthetic feeling, and the will – through which they can be reached.

I have pondered this quote and its implications for nearly a decade. It has become sort of a barometer for detecting the “contextualization climate” of a communicator, program, or system. I’ve come to believe that we cannot mentor others well when we refuse to connect with the multiple immaterial means of engaging in life that God has created in us. And we just don’t have to make it so difficult. In fact, why not make it a sort of “game,” an adventure in figuring out the ways different people learn best, and then accommodating them – instead of always expecting them to do it the ways WE are most comfortable with?

Since we do not all learn the same way, it is intriguing to find a set of items that do take that into account, whether by intuitive discernment or intentional design. And my favorite such set consists of all kinds of games based on The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps sometimes I can detail what I’d discovered in the process of researching this wide range of games (and playing with many of them!). As an appetizer, consider that I found games …

  • … that engage the mind with strategy, engage the imagination with role playing, engage the feelings with relationship-based storylines, engage the soul with questions that require reflection about deeper meanings and symbolisms, and engage the will with decision-making that parallels similar quests and questions that Lord of the Rings characters faced.
  • … that require use of word smart (games that require reading), logic smart (strategy games), picture smart (trading card sets that use photography or paintings; video games that use animation), music smart (soundtrack selections on an accompanying DVD), body smart (moving items in board games), nature smart (recognizing patterns in matching related items), people smart (storyline-based games), and self-smart (Hobbit personality type). 

The Do-It-Yourself Section

So – back to His Dark Materials …

The American publisher, Scholastic, has issued a series of seven books about The Golden Compass adaptation to a film format. If you are interested in doing some systems digging for yourself, check out the Scholastic’s Golden Compass webpages. There you’ll find not only the books they produce, but many interviews, educators’ resources, and other materials that will help you explore their products as a system. Try out the few frameworks I gave as a way to analyze their seven books. Or perhaps you’d like to pursue some additional or more detailed approaches on learning styles. In that case, I’d recommend Kathy Koch’s book on multiple intelligences that I mentioned earlier, and Discover Your Child’s Learning Style by Mariaemma Willis and Victoria Kindle-Hodson.

And now, I am afraid I must end this post, and skedaddle over to an eBay auction for a full set of all seven Scholastic books that concludes in a few minutes. If I win, it will cost a bit over half the list price – woo-hoo!

Part 4 will address cultural trends and what they can tell us. Tentatively, Part 5 will give my actual review of The Golden Compass movie, probably with lots of questions, and at least some commentary on related learning system products and cultural context. 

Jump forward to Concrete Media Systems – The Golden Compass, Part 4, Differentiation of Cultural Trends. 

Jump back to Concrete Media Systems – The Golden Compass, Part 2, Covert Assumption Absorption (Hidden Curriculum).