DISCOVERY LEARNING AND MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Jerome Bruner (1915-) is currently (2006) Research professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Law at New York University. He is well known for giving a new direction to education in the 1950s which was at the time influenced by behaviourism.
He established a Cognitive Theory of learning, which was later developed by others including his former student Howard Gardner. In his book A Study of Thinking, which was published in 1956, he explained how information is achieved, remembered and transformed.
Bruner is closely connected to Constructivism, although as we will see his ideas challenge those of Piaget's.
The tuning fork for Bruner's work is that education is a journey of discovery.
When we try to get to know Bruner's thoughts on education we find that he has ,like Piaget, created a four-fold structure and in the manner of Vygotsky scaffolding can also be perceived.
In his book The Process of Education (1960) he defined knowledge as a process involving the following themes

Structure
Children learn best when there is a structure to what they are learning rather than a huge collection of random facts

Readiness
As in the spiral curriculum which evolves from Bruner you can teach anything to any age in an appropriate form, and revisit it as the child develops.

Intuition
Although intuition is not well understood, Bruner considered that education should find ways of nourishing it.

Motivation
Students should be motivated from the material they are learning rather than external pressure like examinations or other stresses put upon them for various reasons.

There are three stages of learning: the enactive, the iconic and the symbolic stage.

In 1996 he wrote The Culture of Education which shows the changes in his thinking since the 60s:

"culture shapes the mind....It provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of ourselves and our powers"

Strongly connected to Bruner's work, through his student Howard Gardner, is the theory of multiple intelligences illustrated below and discussed in my post

Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and writer, is my choice for illustrating linguistic intelligence.



Hypathia of Alexandria, the outstanding mathematician and philosopher, is here pictured for mathematical intelligence.



J. S. Bach demonstrates musical intelligence.






The Eurythmist demonstrates in every move the kinestetic intelligence.




Raphael is my choice for the visual intelligence. Just think of his design of The Transfiguration in Vatican city or the Sistine Madonna.




The great orator, Savonarola, had his audience trembling due to his powerful interpersonal skills.



The German visionary and philosopher, Hildegard von Bingen, represents high intrapersonal intelligence.



The Swedish naturalist and astronomer, Sophie Brahe, had an acute sense of observation (NATURALIST intelligence)



The young Steiner demonstrated EXISTENTIAL (SPIRITUAL) intelligence and went on to develop a general theory of being