Moving Prose
Barbara Tversky on why actions speak louder than words
What are thoughts made of? Not words, asserts Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology & Education, in (Basic Books 2019). Rather, spatial cognition enables us to draw meaning from our bodies, surroundings and actions ā and actions underlie languageās structure and meaning.
Tversky says spatial cognition enables us to draw meaning from our bodies, surroundings and actions, which underlie language. (Photo: Deborah Feingold)
Mind in Motion āupends everything most of us think we know about thinking,ā says āThink Againā podcast host Jason Gots. Nature says the book transports us from āthe āworld in the mindā to the āmind in the world.āā And the Wall Street Journalās takeaway is that āthe fact that our brains are in bodies shapes how they think.ā
Education, too, must recognize that visuals, from diagrams to comic books, communicate more directly than symbolic words. āThe naming game with babies itself depends on joint attention and gesture,ā Tversky argues. āThereās so much more to say, but that would be another book.ā āJoe Levine
āAā is for āAgencyā
Seeing preschoolers as authors
Souto-Manning mentored a pre-K teacher who guided her students in editing recorded narratives based on their daily play. (Photo: Bill Cardoni)
They werenāt yet reading books fluently, let alone contemplating publishing them. Yet the children of the Pre-K East classroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts, became authors. Pre-K Stories: Playing with Authorship and Integrating Curriculum in Early Childhood (¶¶Ņõapp Press 2019), by their teacher, Dana Frantz Bentley, and her mentor, Mariana Souto-Manning, TC Professor of Early Childhood Education, describes how Bentley helped the children edit recorded narratives based on their daily play and create āreally realā (OK, some were typed and stapled) volumes: The Whole Pre-K East Book (stories with drawings); The Book of Paper Airplane Experts (a how-to, with photos); A Book of Family Shares (familiesā stories of the childrenās homelives); All of the Seasons Square: A Season World (poetry accompanying the childrenās classroom mural); and The Pre-K East Life Book, memories to help others āknow how to be in our class.ā Deciding on the kidsā curriculum would have been easier but ācurriculum needs to be co-constructed with them,ā Bentley writes, adding, āteaching the development of humanity.ā āPatricia Lamiell