This site provides a set of open-source guides and tools for elementary school teachers to adapt to a variety of topics and texts. The site is a product of research that students in a survey course, American Literature for Elementary Education, conducted for their final projects. Students worked in pairs to create an online teaching resource on a text of their choosing for elementary school instructors. The goal of the final project was to create a teaching tool on a selected text that engages multiple intelligences.
Harvard’s Graduate School of Education describes multiple intelligences:
The standard psychological view of intellect states that there is a single intelligence, adequately measured by IQ or other short answer tests. Multiple intelligences (MI) theory, on the other hand, claims on the basis of evidence from multiple sources that human beings have a number of relatively discrete intellectual capacities. Components of multiple intelligences theory include:
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Logical-Mathematical
- Naturalist
- Spatial
- Bodily-Kinesthetic
- Linguistic
- Musical
In comparing MI to traditional psychological view of intelligence, one might find it useful to think of them analogously as if they were computers. Belief in a single intelligence implies that humans possess a single general purpose computer, which can perform well (high IQ), average (normal IQ), or poorly (low IQ). Belief in MI theory implies that human beings possess several relatively independent computers where strength in one computer does not predict strength (or weakness) in the other computers. Put concretely, one might have high (or low) spatial intelligence, but that does not predict whether one will have high (or low) musical or interpersonal intelligence.
This theory was originally put forth in Howard Gardner’s landmark 1983 book Frames of Mind and has been put to use in the ensuing years in classrooms all over the world.
Project Zero. (n.d.) Retrieved December 8, 2019 from http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/multiple-intelligences. .
The projects exhibited here engage two or more of Gardner’s defined intelligences. For example, one group created a list of scenes from Disney movies for educators who want to target musical and spatial intelligence to teach Transcendentalism. You might also generate a lesson plan that guides elementary school instructors on how to teach a text to multiple intelligences. Another group created a podcast, incorporating musical and naturalist intelligence, to teach “The Raven.” Another group created a photo journal and timeline for teaching the Civil Rights Era through the children’s book The Bus Ride That Changed the History. These teaching tools have also been designed with a specific grade-level or range of grade-levels in mind.
To access the teaching resources that Education students developed for this website, go to Teaching Guides. To learn about the students’ process of discovery and research, go to the Discovery Blog.
You can also navigate to the right sidebar or bottom of the page to identify blog posts on a specific author, book, literary period, or intelligence category.
American Literature for Elementary Education was a course taught at Sacred Heart University in Fall 2019.
American Literature for Elementary Education 