I learned this week that Generation Z and Millenials both have increasingly visual learning styles compared to students of previous generations. The impact this has on pedagogical styles varies from whether or not using textbooks makes sense to implementing group projects that themselves focus on areas that students find themselves most difficult to understand.
In some ways, there’s nothing new under the sun, but in other ways, we must step back and realize we don’t know everything going on under the sun.
I recently also learned that chimpanzees are able to identify accurately the location and order of over twenty objects on a screen after just a moment’s viewing of that screen. With high accuracy, chimps can point to the location of these many objects after less than one second of viewing a screen with those objects. It is hypothesized that the chimp brain has developed an advanced ability to tell where other chimps are within its field of view because this is very important to social behaviors – fighting, mating, sharing, rearing, etc. – that comprise the complex activities, we might even call them “politics” or “civics,” of chimp life. Chimps’ brains are not much smaller than human brains, as a proportion of body mass. What researchers are positing is that humans have used our cranial mass to develop – rather than the chimp’s visual prowess – spoken language. We have additionally turned spoken language into transportable, stored data technologies, namely the written word.
It seems that we have developed reading and writing skills as a primary way of transmitting information, it’s almost needless to say, as humans. However, I’m concerned that we have not sufficiently emphasized visual learning and visual thought – meaning visual abstraction primarily – as a type of reasoning and understanding the world around us. It is surely true that visualization is one of the highest bandwidth capacities of the human brain and mind. Our eyes, after all, are essentially directly connected to our brains, almost as if our eyes were an external part of our brain, so close and dense is the connection of our eyes and brain.
The pedagogical tools of the last century or two, from the 19th to the end of the 20th centuries, has focused on literature – the written word – as a means of providing and demonstrating erudition. In fact, if we look at the credentials of learned men (and we must face the fact that scholarly prowess was measured essentially for men only the further back we go) consist of evidence of their facility to discuss the readings they understood. In the 17th century, few people beyond the aristocracy and clergy could read and write. In the 18th century, the enlightenment era brought long-form prose to the forefront of what human scholarship could produce. In the 20th century, long-form writing continued to be the predominant way of learning, teaching, and sharing information and ideas.
In the 21st century, we have access to visual technologies that are superior in many ways to writing. This is what Generation Z and Millenials see as an advantage in terms of learning. Before this generation, visual technologies had a poorer capability to assist in learning.
By way of example, let’s look at the YouTube channel called 3 Blue 1 Brown which focuses on learning mathematics. The complex animated diagrams and charts shown by the channel are indeed rich with visual mathematical information. This differs from long-form treatises that are interspersed with equations, as what often shows in very dry textbooks on mathematics. Here is an example of this visual explanation technology:
The reason I made this post today is because shortly after learning about the more visual learning styles of younger generations of students today, I was reminded of the visual reasoning of Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking. Hawking once said, “Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.” Seeing things, visually and abstractly, are what sets apart these great physicists – and many other physicists – from those who reason with equations, prose – such as the law, or verse. Perhaps most-like the lyrics of musicians and poets are shorter and less formal than prose, journals, or law, and describe complex emotional and sensory communication that is marred and distorted by using words to attempt their transmittal… complex visual understanding and reasoning is also best done apart from long-form prose, apart from formal writing.
The ability of Michael Faraday to see the electromagnetic fields he imagined visually was so astute that Maxwell was able to take his verbal descriptions and drawings and translate that into equations that showed the beauty of Faraday’s understanding in a different light. So strong was Faraday’s visual understanding that he collaborated with scholars at Cambridge University to invent new words: electrolysis for example was a word that Faraday invented to describe the electrochemical interactions he understood visually and experimentally.
Let us not stifle visual learning and reasoning in our students; the world today is VERY complex, and our learning can no longer rely only on prosaic textbooks that are dry and require passive learning techniques to pick up the assuredly interesting and useful topics they cover. Today, we must do better than these old passive learning technologies, to embrace shorter and more specific examples, interactive learning tools including video and animation, as well as interactive software to allow students to work together to solve problems and interact with each other to understand concepts as they learn.
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