"Learners Do Not Think in Words Alone"

In Chapter 1 of his book, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, Jason Palmeri argues “if we give students the opportunity to create a visual representation of their audiences (using found images or original drawings), we may be able to gain a much richer sense of their rhetorical thinking than if we limited them to verbal audience analysis alone.” He draws on the work of Flower and Hayes, and discusses how translation is the idea that “writers do not think in words alone” (p. 32). This section of the chapter particularly stood out to me because of my work as a special education teacher. Based on those experiences, I would replace the word “writers” with “learners” so that Palmeri’s statement reads as “learners do not think in words alone.” Throughout my time in the classroom, I have worked with students with various learning needs ranging from reading comprehension struggles to receptive or expressive language impairments to math problem solving deficits. A strategy I have often found successful for students of all ability levels is building their awareness about different learning modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic), and exploring self-identification of their own dominant modality depending on assignments, tasks, and content area. In Louisiana, the online Individualized Education Plan (IEP) template I use with other stakeholders to select appropriate accommodations and modifications for a student has “use multi-sensory modes/tools to reinforce instruction” as a possible choice (see image #1 below). It is rare that I choose not to select this particular accommodation when I draft IEPs because I believe that effective teaching is multimodal teaching, and that it involves finding ways to differentiate instructional strategies based on student need.

Image #1: Table from accommodations and modifications page of Louisiana online IEP template

Over the past two years, I have worked with students who struggle in the area of mathematics. I have tried to distance my instruction, at least with new or unfamiliar concepts, away from the abstract (i.e. numbers and symbols) and towards more “nonverbal mental imagery” (p. 34), which many of my students are more inclined to engage with. When introducing a new skill to students, we often start at a concrete level and use real-life objects or manipulatives to build a problem we are trying to solve. Other times, we may solve the problem by drawing a sketch, picture, or diagram. Both of these methods require students to do some visualizing or movie making in their heads (see image #2 below). I find that my students experience a great deal of success at the concrete and representational levels of math and that even when they begin to understand the abstract parts of math like equations, they still move back and forth between the concrete and representational modes. This is not a linear or “reductive” process of making meaning but instead a “dynamic process of moving between internal multimodal representations of knowledge (in the mind) and external multimodal representations (on the computer or page)” (p. 33-34). When I think about teaching math to students with disabilities and Palmeri’s arguments, I see that his arguments are not just applicable to writing, but applicable to many other subject areas and types of learning.

Image #2: Examples of math problem solved in concrete, representational, and abstract modes (image comes from “Principles for Designing Intervention in Mathematics” from National Center on Intensive Intervention)