5 Myths About Learning in College: Myth 4
American painter Winslow Homer often took elementary education as his subject. This 1877 watercolor, “Blackboard,” depicts a drawing lesson of a style popular in the 1870s.
I share these 5 myths with my students up front to counter the stigma that may in their minds accompany the use of manipulatives like construction toys, craft materials, and the like.
Myth 4: College students are abstract thinkers, and have no problem learning new things when they are presented abstractly.
Given all the benefits of thinking with things, why don’t we do more of it in the classroom? What is holding us back? One barrier to better teaching practice is the timeworn distinction between the “abstract” and the “concrete.” Although rarely discussed and never well defined in academia, the concrete has about it the whiff of the simple, the primitive, the specific, the particular, and the provincial. Abstraction, on the other hand, is the general, the transcendent, the essential, the ultimate goal of the life of the mind. The modern university, venerating abstraction, has an uneasy relationship with the concrete, especially with the tangible.
In teaching social science I often used physical materials in classroom exercises, and sometimes taught in locations where other faculty would walk past my classroom. Some colleagues gave me strange looks when they saw my students building with Lego, making Tinkertoy concept maps, or creating autobiographical collages about their research interests. Perhaps it was the happy chatter coming from my classroom as students built that first attracted their attention. One colleague stuck his head in and said, as if in jest, “you’re having too much fun.” A student I had just recruited as a graduate assistant told me that a humanities professor had warned her about me, and described her work with me with the derogatory “playing with Lego.” I hasten to add that many colleagues have embraced the idea of thinking with things in the classroom and are eager to understand how to put into practice their intuitive sense that this approach has value.
The idea that college students are abstract thinkers, who can effectively be presented with new material introduced in abstract form, stems in part from a misunderstanding of the influential work of the brilliant psychologist Jean Piaget. His stage theory of child development has been widely understood to mean that by the time students arrive in college they are well into the abstract thinking, or “formal operations,” stage of development and therefore comfortable with abstractions across the board. In his later writing Piaget clarified that learners, especially those learning something new, draw heavily on the cognitive resources developed in earlier, concrete stages. Effective instruction should therefore begin with things that are close, tangible, graspable and build up to the abstract as the learner develops experience and expertise. A learner’s progression to abstract thinking is not an automatic development from child to adult, but a development from novice to expert, which can take place at any age. The myth that all college material can be presented abstractly does a great disservice to those who are novices in the subject matter being taught.
To counter this myth, I offer the following proposition: