Howard Gardner

An Introduction

Howard Gardner, born in 1943, has followed a multi-faceted career in the field of cognition and education. He has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981, and – as the first American - the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in education in 1990. He holds fourteen honorary degrees including degrees from Princeton University, McGill University and Tel Aviv University. He is the author of eighteen books and several hundred articles.

In 1986 he began teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and holds a John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs professorship. In addition he is Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Throughout his career path he has continued his long-term involvement with Project Zero, a research group in human cognition that maintains a special focus on the arts.

Howard Gardner is a prolific author and popular speaker. There are numerous Gardner interviews and articles accessible online. Consult http://pzweb.harvard.edu/Default.htm  for more information on Gardner’s current projects and involvements.

Howard Gardner’s singular contribution to educational theory and practice has been his concept of multiple intelligences, first introduced in his 1983 book Frames of Mind. This concept provides educators with an unequalled tool to design more personalized curriculum, instruction and assessment. It opens for the learner long-closed doors toward deeper understanding and comprehension. It also fosters raised self-esteem in the process of learning.

Gardner’s focus is on school reform efforts in the United States. However, his research activities and results benefit any learner at any age. The use of multiple intelligences means the application of different modes of perception inherent in all of us. We are born with distinct and individually dominant modes of perception.

Observing small children in their initial attempts to understand the world around them will make the difference of perceptual approaches quite transparent. It also will lead the adult to remembering his/her pre-dominant mode of perception, maybe long atrophied by lack of usage and repression. It is the repression of distinct modes of perception that has led to learning deficiencies, lethargy and lack of motivation.

Traditional schooling and testing relies primarily on two modes of perception which Gardner labels as the verbal/linguistic and mathematical/logical intelligences. The use of spatial, musical, visual or kinesthetic perceptions in processing information is regarded as inferior or altogether repressed. Educational ills of today can be explained in most cases by this practice of one-sided use of processing information and forming knowledge.

Gardner’s concepts and research on multiple intelligences and how to use them has opened a way for fundamentally changing learning habits – from exclusively linear, left-brain thought processes to whole brain learning.

While children can be guided from their initial pre-dominant mode of perception to the use of all nine intelligences, adult learners can be led to the rediscovery of atrophied or lost modes of perception and ultimately to a fully satisfying learning experience. Gardner points to ways of achieving this – by using the arts as stimulant for the use of our creativity and imagination in the learning process.