It is a a bit of thought that i took from dewey's how we think. he
posited that very few people have ever sat back and tried to
experience and then articulate the experience of their own thought.
My exercise in this is generally to help people understand how their
minds work in relation to imagery and narrative. I show them an image
that they don't know, but it heavily embedded in myth or cultural
reference. I show them that and ask them to try to identify it. To
use their knowledge of their culture, or whatever they have
available. I ask them to identify the object as well as they can.
Then after that, i ask them to write about what they did mentally
while they were trying to figure out what the thing in the image was.
I ask them to remember and phenomenologically experience that mental
process and write it out. after all that i ask them to share that
experience. it is important that no one shares it before it is
written, or they will all write the same thing, which is usually just
what the first person says.
from this i've gathered that i generally have 3 types of thinkers more
or less, so far... and this is not research, this is just gathered
from student exercises.
there are textualists/narrativists, which are looking for reference
and story
there are conceptualists/analysts which are trying to understand
composition, relationships, and meaning, usually not using narratives,
but using conceptual analysis, such as logic, math, philosophy
there are imagery people, who think in images and attempt to match the
image, this is most interesting, because there are two sections
here.... one again is compositionalist, but the other.... describes a
process of matching or shuffling, which i'm fascinated by. one
student described it as flipping through his families picture books
and looking for matches, another one described it as watching movies
in her mind.
so... those are the modes of thinking that students have reported when
they are presented with an image that they could probably recognize if
they knew the right story.
the idea is to get them to think about the way that they think, as
dewey suggests we do, to push their phenomenological awareness of
their own minds.
On Jul 28, 2009, at 9:58 AM, Charles Burnette wrote:
>
> On Jul 27, 2009, at 7:15 PM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
>
>> One exercise that i have most of my students in upper levels and
>> graduate school is to phenomonologically investigate the methods in
>> which they resolve a heuristic problem, the modes of thought they
>> use, and it is always surprising the variation in modes that people
>> use, even after years and years of education that seems to promote
>> one mode over others.
>
> Could you elaborate? What modes have you identified? Which have been
> promoted by education over the others?
> Thanks,
> Chuck
>>
>
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