CASES and THEORIES

CASE 1: You want to teach grammar and sentence structures

In a third grade, the pupils bring their pets to the classroom. All the children get to show, hold, feel and talk to and about the pets.

Afterwards the pupils make drawings (an expression based on their impressions), that relate to the impressions they have had. The drawings express their impressions. They tell about their drawings and thereby verbalize both the impression and the expression. While telling, their partners will write down (central) words and phrases being used. Now the students have a small text archive with words and phrases.

This archive now forms the basis for working with grammar. The students sort the words into word classes, adjectives, nouns and verbs, etc. They discuss in pairs how to use the words as parts of a sentence, and they play with the words and make different structures and sentences using the same words. Which words are controlling the structure of the sentence? Who are the actions in the sentence related to? What happens, if leave out the adjectives or add more adjectives, etc.? 

CASE 2: Work on your teaching and the didactical choices you make by being playful!

All the tables, chairs and furniture are put aside. On the floor there are only yoga mats. The students lie on their backs trying to control their breathing, inhaling through the nose, deep down into the belly, retaining the breath and then exhaling slowly through the nose. The yogi is gentle but imperative about what students have to do. It doesn’t matter who you are, or why you are here. You are just following the instructions.

The breathing exercise is followed by a sequence, where the students have to come up with animal poses. In pairs, the students have (randomly) drawn plastic animals from a bag. They must figure out how to do a pose representing the animal they have drawn. The next step is for each pair to instruct the others in how to make – embody – their animal.

Using the body is the most important language. It is a bodily experience that puts the students in a position where the spoken language is of minor importance.

Back at the tables, the students are given a new assignment: They must draw the best teaching experience they have ever had. Some drawings show floor plans and furniture others show matchbox people interacting. No words. After ten minutes the drawings are passed on to the person next to you, who adds new things to the drawing – an innovation – a collaborative exercise without any language except the visual.

Materials are introduced. Cardboard, glue guns, gears, wire, make-do, colors and more. The new task is presented: Make a machine that will process teaching and discuss all of the functions and possibilities that it contains. On the blackboard are the words from the drawing exercise written as the only guideline and without explanation.

The words from Michael Uljens pedagogical fly (Uljens, 1997) are also written on the blackboard. Some groups pay attention, others are already absorbed in constructing the didactic machine. One group is sketching the machine on paper and discussing what it must do. Another group is concerned with the materials and lets the materials guide them in a constructed sketch that grows, as more materials are brought to the table.

In the middle of the room the magic, random machine (see illustration) is placed. The sound when it spins, fills the room; and the “obstacles”, that it generates, are clearly motivating. In the first round the random machine chooses a color for the group. In the next round it chooses a material that must be used in constructing the didactic machine.

The construction work makes the groups discuss. Lots of reflections on the process and the didactics. Just before the time is up, the random machine gives the groups one last assignment: How would you explain the function of your didactic machine to a pupil, a headmaster, a mother, a future employer or a colleague. This “obstacle” results in new reflections on the function and a search for a vocabulary that fits the perspective. Further work and rethinking.

During the lunch break many students continued talking about their machines, how to present the machine but also, how it could be developed. The creativity continued (Saltofte, 2020). What if we did this? Oh no! We haven´t got the time for it. Did we understand the objective right? Our machine is different from the others. Evaluation of the general objectives.

After the lunch break the didactic machines were presented. How they wanted to present their machines was up to the groups, but everyone was asked to add sound to the machine (what does your machine sound like when it is turned on and running?)

THEORY A: Three ways of gaining knowledge – three different ways of learning

In contexts of aesthetical learning there are three fundamental ways of gaining knowledge and thereby to learn (Hohr og Pedersen 2003):

• Empiric knowledge-gaining – based on the senses. When you are born, the only way to learn is through your senses. It is basically a kind of registration or perception. You can sense differences in temperature, for example.
• Aesthetical knowledge-gaining – based on interpretation / subjective experiences. A baby will pretty quickly connect the sensations to feelings. To get a notion you will have to interpret the sensation and make it into an experience. An example: Body temperature is nice and connected to the mother, while a change of temperature is connected to something strange or new. The difference in temperature will be registered as a perception, and this perception might be interpreted as (a feeling of) coldness or as heat.
•  Discursive knowledge-gaining – based on analysis and discursiveness. When you analyze, you will divide the holistic feeling and categorize it. You will for example analyze the experience of temperature into a spatial, temporal, and a material frame of understanding. Touching metal could be experienced as a cold feeling; using your other senses the metal is not just perceived as cold but also as shining. The metal object might also be perceived as hard and as having a smooth texture. When hit the metal it gives a ringing sound. Sensing, observing, and interpreting the metal piece both requires and gives you a discursive framework for analyzing metal pieces as hot or cold, hard or soft, smooth or coarse, shining or mat, ringing or silent.

These three ways of gaining knowledge are not to be understood as a hierarchy; but as something that is continuously active – simultaneously and iteratively. You cannot understand and analyze anything without using the senses, the holistic interpretation schemes and discursive concepts.

THEORY B: Variation in teaching through “The four ways of being active” (Brodersen et al.)

When teaching, you are constantly making decisions about what activities your students should do. To help you create awareness of what you are initiating, you can use the model below. It is a model showing four ways of being active. It can also help you to make decisions that can bring about variation in the way you teach as well as making room for all types of students.

The model distinguishes between four types of being active: aesthetically active and analytically active, communicatively active and crafting active.

Being aesthetically and analytically active lies at opposite ends of a dimension going from the synthetic (holistic), where things are combined, to the analytical, where things are taken apart. Synthetic activities are about putting things together, while analytical activities are about taking things apart. Thats the horizontal dimension.

The vertical dimension is adding ways of being active to the horizontal dimension, being communicatively active and craft-active. To gain a skill, you will have to be active in both observing and training the specific skill. You will also need to be active in communication to improve your learning outcome. To do that you will both need to participate in communities of practice and explain your content of learning in a dialogic community.

Each of the four types of action has both an impressive and an expressive relation to the content you are working with. When you, for example, are in the area of being ​​craft-active, you can be both an observer (you see what the master does) and an apprentice (training the observed skills), both someone who watches and someone who practices.

To achieve a nuanced understanding of, and to get a comprehensive grip on, a specific content area, it is important to bring both the different ways of being active and the three ways of learning into your didactical reflection.

In a process of sensing, experiencing and analyzing, you move horizontally from being aesthetically (synthetically) active to being analytically active. The movement does not only go in one direction, it also goes back again, not just once, but usually several times – in a form of circular movement. The process is expanded both through the communicative activities (listening and speaking), and through the craft activities. The four types of activities are all parts of the learning process.

When you are working on your didactics, remember to include all four types of being active and be sure that there is room for the three ways of recognition/learning: sensations, experiences and analysis. It is essential both for motivation and for making the content useful, relevant, meaningful, and thereby important to the student.

The four ways of being active and the associated model were developed by didactics (Schnedler et al.) working within the so-called practical-musical subjects. The first steps towards the model and the underlying distinctions were formulated in connection with a mapping and development project within the practical-musical subjects.

The model can be read as a defense of an action-and-student-activating didactics: One wants to get students talking and expressing themselves (instead of just being communicative objects); one wants them to use their hands and their body (and not just their brains). One wants them to sense and experience (and not just analyze). One wants the senses and hands to be involved and the mouth to be free in pedagogical practice. School had perhaps become too focused on knowledge. Too much brain. The practical-musical subjects had something to offer. Music, for example, is more than music theory and musicology. Music is also a craft: the art of playing an instrument and the art of using the voice. Music is also listening and sensory experiences. Music tells stories. Music is not only analysis, but also a craft activity, a sensory activity and a communicative activity. The hope and the project were that the school’s other subjects – the so-called book subjects – could be inspired by the practical-musical ones, where the ‘voice’, the ‘hand’ and the ‘senses’ were at least as much on the field as the ‘brain’. The project and the ambition were to balance the different ways of being active. School would simply become boring and child-bad if the ‘voice’, the ‘hand’ and the ‘senses’ had to give way to the ‘brain’ all the time.