According to Sparks, mental thinking can only take us so far in the imaginative, creative process; it is when we begin “body thinking” that we can experience our topic in a fresh, new, creative way. Movement, as well as experiencing through touch, seems to connect us (and hopefully our students as well) to the topic in a more intimate way. This is where we move beyond kinesthetic imaging and begin to put thoughts into motion, but even “body thinking” can be taken a step farther allowing for an even more creative approach when it is combined with “empathizing”.
Where imaging is our attempt to present others with a clearer picture of our own point of view, empathizing puts us in the other person’s shoes, so to speak. However, if we include all that Sparks has addressed throughout each chapter, this cliché becomes more than just how they feel, but all of their senses (i.e. the way they see things, hear things, move through things, etc.)
The “Zoom In” assignment for this module taught me one very important concept about “body thinking” and “empathizing”, both thinking skills push us farther into caring about our topic, and when we care about something we spend more time with it. We learn its hidden patterns, we abstract something surprising from it that we may never have seen before, we observe it with more than just one sense, and we find relationships between it and other objects or ideas of familiarity by making analogies. In the long run, developing these skills can only help me become more thorough in the way I experience things and more thorough in the way I teach things.
One example of this type of thorough teaching comes from Vivian Gussin Paley who used both “body thinking” and “empathy” in her classrooms as she encouraged student’s to act out stories that they had written and stories that they had read; this not only taught them a great deal about each other, but it also taught them a great deal about the characters of the stories, the situations and trials faced by those characters, and how those characters felt. In doing this, Paley’s students understood and connected to literature in a way that promoted an enhanced ability to think critically about, apply reason to, respond to, and feel a part of the literature.
I am a big fan of encouraging students to act out literature by some form—either a play, a skit, a mime, a monologue (with facial expressions or body movements), etc. This exercise causes students to develop their skills in both “body thinking” and “empathizing”. I have found in the past that doing this regularly stimulates better understanding of literature, a respect for literature and sometimes even a love for literature (which is my ultimate goal!) among the students. Through this “acting out” students can pick out what qualities make up an endearing character and they can in turn create their own. Students can feel the difference between a comedy and a tragedy, or even first person or third person and then possess greater understanding of how to write something of their own. My “How do I love thee?” example for module five shows the power of using “body thinking” and “empathizing” to promote student’s understanding of personification. Even after doing the small assignment of imitating the sun in the poem “The Sun Just Had a Nasty Day” by using facial expressions and body movements, students should be able to more easily turn around and create a personification poem of their own about something even as simple as a tree just by imitating its movements and reinterpreting those movements from a human perspective (i.e. instead of saying the tree swayed, we may call it dancing). Ultimately the main goal is reached and student’s creative juices will begin to flow.
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