Mindtools and Song: Connective Bridges to
Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political Stories
Ronald W. Mears Jr.
Teachers College, Columbia University
Abstract: This paper references the constructivist, teaching for understanding paradigm, and discusses the ways that mindtool technologies, such as concept maps, spreadsheets, and databases can support student-centered, self-directed, authentic curricula. Teachers, in a facilitative role, can design generative questions that guide student thinking, and help them to make conceptual connections between their own interests and the general course information. Additionally the paper demonstrates ways for humanities educators to utilize students’ pop culture interests, such as their own song choices, to explore both traditional and interdisciplinary themes. Mindtools can help students make new cognitive connections as they re-examine and re-organize information.
Mindtools as Technological Manipulatives for the Humanities Classroom
Mindtool technologies can provide an effective way of organizing, imagining, or making sense of the world. For the humanities educator, who may be accustomed to making or eliciting social, political, economic, or cultural connections to the curriculum through human stories (be those fictional or non-fictional pieces told through fine art, oration, traditional literary texts or media channels such as film, music, radio, television, or the web) they can provide an alternative way for students to represent idea connections or to make informed inferences by identifying trends in order to eventually invent scenarios, create narrative stories, or establish theories to support specific reasoning. The thinker might ask him or herself one of many questions to elicit those stories. For example, what social scenarios could make this information or data true? How are these things connected? Or, what does this mean?
Learning tools such as concept maps, spreadsheets and databases are mindtools because they are visual representations or “models of things… [where] each tool requires that a learner think in a different way about what they are studying” (Jonassen et al., 2008, p. 83). In essence, mindtools help learners to visualize or imagine patterned connections so that the new information can mesh with the student’s own pre-existing schema in order to assist learning and shape new ways of thinking (Jonassen et al., 2008). Because learners understand information by applying fresh knowledge to prior knowledge and personal experience, mindtools allow students to re-examine and reorganize new information as a way to “share the cognitive burden” (Jonassen et al., 2008, p. 83), a process that assists students in imagining the many different connections that are possible. However, mindtools do not inherently ease learning (Jonassen et al., 2008); instead they offer new insights as manipulatives or information blocks that can be concretely repositioned (i.e. concept maps), graphed, or charted (i.e. data from a database or spreadsheet) rather than merely pondered abstractly in order to assist in the process sometimes identified as “conceptual change” (Jonassen et al., 2008, p. 83). In the humanities, one might use these technological manipulatives or mindtools to see how the story fits together.
Generative Curriculum Questions: Using Mindtools to Make Connections
A humanities educator, interested in engaging students in authentic inquiry and interdisciplinary study, might develop the following expansive question for his or her own curriculum objectives as a way to assist the development of a more simplified generative question which would later guide his or her students’ generative curriculum, as well as their eventual participation with technologies and mindtools that could work to assist that inquiry. That educator’s curriculum question to his/ her secondary humanities students might be:
Can students use self-selected popular communications, such as modern song, in order to learn or practice critical analytical skills? Are students more likely to engage in social, cultural, political or economic discussions concerning topics when those topics are self-selected? Is “genuine intellectual inquiry” (Perkins, 1992, p. 11) elicited from their participation with those texts; is “retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge” (Perkins, 1992, p. 11) more likely during this authentic inquiry and during recall (Perkins, 1992); and are discussions concerning such things as values, sexuality, sexual orientation, artistic merit, race or gender more easily accessed if students personally select examples for discussion in order, first, to evaluate those texts individually, based on their own personal emotive and cognitive responses, second, to spawn a creative student-initiated and designed product (be it an essay, a website, a song response, a speech, etc.) which ‘artistically’ represents that inquiry, and third, as a text to be discussed, critically analyzed, or evaluated as a group? Students should be encouraged to design such a product with the intention of connecting their song or popular communication selection with other aspects of the curriculum such as other historical, literary [prose, lyrical or poetic] or media texts encountered in the course and in the world. This curriculum question is directed at secondary humanities [literature, English, or social studies] students.
As mentioned, while this extensive curriculum question might be available to motivate and guide the educator, it will likely be more effective to facilitate the student’s authentic inquiry through a simple, generative question. A question such as the one that follows might work best to spawn student participation: What song do you find most interesting, and what does that song mean?
A successful generative topic allows students to pursue their own interests, has diverse entry points for students to access and explore those interests, in some fashion relates to the experiences of students, and also relates to subject matter and/or additional content in a deep and meaningful way (Wiske et al., 2005). The key is to begin in a place that is interesting to the student, and this generative topic does just that in allowing students to explore their own interests and see how those interests relate to the world (Wiske et al., 2005). According to the Sony Music webpage (2005), students define themselves in their social groups, styles of dress, attitudes, and interests most often through the music they like. Often, musical interests are linked to a student’s understanding of his or her own identity (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000). While there are many possibilities, the following general concept map in figure 1 illustrates the broad way a student might explore identity and meaning through the generative topic after selecting a song text which is personal to them.
Figure 1. The general concept map displayed below would be provided to students in order for them to think about the potential significance and meaning of their song selection. There are many different personal, literary, social, cultural, political and economic connections that they could make between their song choice and the world as they interpret its ‘meaning.’
Figure 2. This concept map is an example of one a student might complete after choosing a song and exploring its meaning.
Figure 3. The song text this particular student selected, displayed in figure 2, is The Way We Were by Barbara Streisand. This is just a brief depiction of some information the student might add to the concept map based on her own experiences with the song, her own interests, her own interpretation of the song’s meaning, and her own research. In the following spreadsheet (figure 3) the educator has centered the focus the analysis less around the total song construct and more so around the song lyrics, although additional spreadsheets could serve as mindtools to consider the information in any number of other ways.
Figure 1. [Yellow ovals, above and below]
Figure 2. [Green squares, above]
Lyrical Reference / Literary Device / Meaning / Category / Explanation / Reminds me of…Water color memories / Metaphor / Vivid like paintings / Cultural / We paint to capture moments in time; art is culture / The facet in Photoshop that allows you to change pics to "watercolor"
Scattered pictures / Imagery / She's looking at old photos / Social / We take pictures to remember good times with others / I have tons of pictures from when I was younger; I need to scan to make digital
Has time rewritten every line / Personification / We remember what we want to remember / Social / Time can't write, its not human, but our minds can erase bad or good to validate our current emotions / I have an ex who I miss. I only remember the good but my friends hate him
Memories, like the Corners of my Mind / Simile / Hidden away but not forgotten / Social / We don't always reveal our every thought/desire / Someone saying clear out the cobwebs in our brains; cobwebs are in corners
...of the smiles we left behind / Metaphor / No longer smiling together / Social / You can’t leave smiles or lose them b/c it’s your own lips/ she’s not happy? We smile to show others we are happy. / Smiley face stickers that your teacher puts on your papers! Those you can actually “leave behind!”
Figure 3. [Spreadsheet, above]
Essential Questions: Making Sense of It All
The student has cited, categorized, and organized some of the significant lyrical references from the song as they make sense within her own schema. The essential question used to stimulate specific student inquiry here could be one of several things. One might ask, is this song artistic? Or, is this song poetic? Students would then be charged with using these devices, meanings, and associations as proofs in constructing a thesis or argument to agree with or oppose the song’s poetic or artistic nature. An educator might find it interesting to utilize a database that can group student meanings or stories, as opposed to simply a personalized spreadsheet for each student, as they work with a similar progression of thinking across Bloom’s taxonomy. From knowledge and comprehension to analysis, synthesis and eventually evaluation, students can use that mindtool to build an argument and later evaluate its artistry or poetic nature in something like an essay or power point presentation. Additionally, with databases an educator and his or her students can better examine the stories or trends that lyrical references and their associated meanings afford from a variety of student’s perspectives in order to draw rich connections across song texts, genres of music, sounds, themes, rhythmic patterns and the like.
The above spreadsheet is just a small example of what could be categorized. An exploration of song or story themes, with the assistance of the database information, would even help students to connect other forms of storytelling like film or novel to song in order to examine larger issues like “what stories [can teach] us” (Jonassen et al., 2008, p. 94-95) about the human condition. Interestingly, the question ‘can stories teach us?’ or ‘what can stories teach us?’ could be another generative topic to explore later in the curriculum.
In conclusion, mindtools such as concept maps, spreadsheets or databases can contribute to humanities inquiry. Just as stories help students to make social, political, economic or cultural connections, “constructing technology-mediated models of phenomena is among the most conceptually engaging tasks that students can undertake” (Jonassen et al., 2008, p. 95). In no uncertain terms, mindtools help students organize information in order to envision theories or create connective stories that make sense of those scenarios and bridge those gaps. Like the scenario described in the London Bridge song (the destruction and rebuilding of a construct that so many students have been rhymed in their youth), concrete bridges provide human spatial connections, while abstract bridges promote symbolic stories or metaphors to help students make strong human connections and imagine the vast workings of the world. With mindtools, we can see the visual representation of the student’s cognitive processes, and through story we understand the richness of those connections. Through self-directed authentic curricula, we can get a sense of that which makes our students tick. This paper references song as a wonderful place to start.
References
Alvermann, D., Hagood, M. (2000). Fandom and critical media literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43 (5), 436-446.
Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. & Crismond, D. (2008). Meaningful learning with technology. Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Perkins, D. (1992). Smart schools: Better thinking and learning for every child. The Free Press: New York, NY.
Sony (2005). Sony Music webpage. Retrieved May 3, 2005, from http://www.sonymusic.com/home.html
Wiske, M., Franz, K. & Breit, L. (2005). Teaching for understanding with technology. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.