I loved this assignment, I love this picture and I love my library. This assignment was for Curriculum development. I cherished the excuse to go to staples and buy a 4’ x3’ whiteboard. In contrast to sitting and writing, standing and marking is freeing! There is also something about erasing with big gestures that felt good. I could sense that this was a different kind of contemplation process than that of using a laptop. As an acting singer, I know that setting something down in handwriting is not like setting something down in the computer. The tactile activity reaches a different part of the brain. You can’t fully memorize things if you don’t copy them by hand. It is a different thought process. Further, with the whiteboard (and my terrible handwriting), words take on the character of glyphs. Each concept, each word or phrase of this mind map can refer to a set of books, scores, a set of experiences and ideas, and even, a set of stories, or anecdotes. Any word on the whiteboard could be fleshed out into an essay. This is certainly one of the underlying ideas of this mind map assignment; to move beyond writing introductions, or abstracts, one has to start by setting down the big ideas. In my view, 4’ x 3’wasn’t big enough. I think we miss this process in this era of computers. There is something deeply satisfying about staring out with a way of sketching, or drawing, or scribbling one’s thoughts. And the bigger the canvas, the freer one feels. Certainly we can apply these ideas about thinking graphically, so satisfying to me as teacher, and throw it back to the students. In learner assessment, we have discussed the notion that teachers have stopped labeling students with specialized techniques like kinesthetic, verbal, or kinetic anymore, It is no longer in vogue. With a more complex view towards the congitive sciences, we try to avoid over-simplification. But this does not mean that different modalities that involve drawing, sketching and graphic illustrations are not extremely useful. In differentiation, when we explore student intelligences, we often allow students to express themselves using various modalities. A mind map is wonderful tool that can allow students to synthesize content, cluster lexical fields, or even visually scaffold grammatical patterns making them more accessible.
