Central Ranges : Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner - 2005

Tue, Mar 15, 2005; by Bill Coppinger.

The Three Pillars - Education, Business, Community- Partnerships for the future.

The Board of Directors of the Central Ranges Local Learning and Employment Network secured Dr. Howard Gardner as the Key-note speaker for its combined 2005 Annual General Meeting and Members and Industry Forum.

From the outset, Dr. Gardner's succinct and elegant presentation style captured the attention and imagination of those attending the forum. Dr. Gardner emphasised the need to approach education with a focus much more on the individual.

Howard Gardner Dr. Gardner said:

"If the MI theory is even approximately true, we should individualise education much more. Schools used to be uniform schools, that teach everybody the same thing in the same way, you test them in same way and that seemd to be fair. But I propose that is completely unfair, because it delivers school entirely in the vain of the people who are good in language and logic.

So, if we really want to educate every person, we need to know much much more about his or her intellectual configurations and how to teach and assess in ways that are friendly to that person.

Professor Gardner also outlined his new work, 'Five Minds for the Future', outlining his own concerns and observations about the 'types of minds needed in the future'.

The full story can be viewed here.

A full 'podcast' of the event can also be downloaded, see below.

PodCast

We have permission from Dr. Gardner to make available his presentation in audio form and have published them below.

Professor Howard Gardner
John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education

CRLLEN - Annual General Meeting and Industry Forum " The Three Pillars"
Friday, May 13th, 2005,
File Size: 112.1 Mb

To view infomation about the Annual General Meeting, inlcuding nominations forms etc, follow this link.

Why the Three Pillars?

We are looking for new ways to structure post-compulsory education and training, new roles and partnerships for business and community stakeholders and specifically, new opportunities for young people and the communities in which they live. This will require a review and reform of many of our existing structures and practices.

What should be taught? How should it be taught? What structures and methods are required to prepare young people for the future? What role does Business, Industry and the community play in the learning institutions of the future?

These are just some of the questions that Dr. Gardner and the assembled panel of experts will discuss on May 13th 2005.

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero.

Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in Education and in 2000 he received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from twenty colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy and Israel.

The author of over twenty books translated into twenty-two languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past two decades, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment; and the nature of interdisciplinary efforts in education.

In recent years, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has embarked on a study of GoodWork - work that is at once excellent in quality and also socially responsible. The GoodWork Project includes studies of outstanding leaders in several professions--among them journalism, law, science, medicine, theater, education, and philanthropy-- as well as examination of exemplary institutions and organizations.

Dr. Gardner, pictured with students from a Manila MI school
he visited while speaking in the Philippines. [Source: howardgardner.com]

In 2001, Basic Books published Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, the first book to issue from Gardner and colleagues' current research study; this book is now available in paperback. Other recent books, available in paperback, are The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Penguin Books, 2000) and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (Basic Books, 1999).

In 2004, two new books have been published: Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing our Own and Other People's Minds and Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (with Wendy Fischman, Becca Solomon, and Deborah Greenspan).

Dr. Gardner recently participated in a conference sponsored by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement. The panel discussion
entitled "Inclusive Education: From Benevolence to Belonging" can be viewed on the web at www.inclusiveschools.org.

Links to Dr. Gardner's work:

Biographical Writings

In his own words [PDF 40KB]