Make teachers and educators visually smart for inclusive education

16 September, 2012

It is often said in educational circles that every child is unique and so is his/ her style of learning. Children are smart in different ways due to their unique social learning experiences. But unfortunately, most teachers have a fixed and rigid teaching style, which makes learning exclusive for a nominal few.

ACCORDING TO a noted psychologist, Howard Gardner, children are often smart in seven ways, namely, visually smart, verbally smart, logically-mathematically smart, bodily-kinesthetically smart, musically smart, interpersonally smart, and intra-personally smart.

Our teaching methods are suitable for verbally smart or linguistically intelligent students only. That means that a teacher is teaching only to 10 percent of students. Unless, he or she incorporates the learning approaches in the lesson, it cannot be inclusive and differentiated learning to appeal to most children.

Researches inform that more percentage of students are visually smart and love to draw and visualize but hardly any teacher has a good training in visual skills and drawing of visual symbols so as to make lessons boring for most students.

Drawing visuals, reading and interpreting picture, making charts, art work, sketching, painting are some of the skills teachers need to acquire through training but before that teacher educators need to acquire visual skills.

In an orientation programme of teacher-educators, no one could draw an animal properly. No one had ever drawn a visual on the blackboard ever since they became teacher-educators. They were hesitant to draw or paint. An experience of simple wavy-lines painting and curvy-lines painting (see inset picture) opened them up to play with shapes and colours.

Visual skills training material for teachers and teacher-educators needs to be developed and training courses to be implemented to make them visually smart first.