Thinking With Your Body...In Someone Else's Shoes.!

What comes to mind when you hear the word proprioceptive thinking?  In my classroom, "normal" is the word that comes to mind.  Propriocetive thinking, also known as body thinking or kinesthetic thinking is the idea behind our mind making a connection with our body and where our four limbs are in space.  This concept is a powerful concept in education as it helps solidify hard concepts especially for kinesthetic learners.  "As we walk or run or jump we are constantly aware of how our body feels; and we know where we are in space" (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 161).  "We are very aware of our proprioceptive senses when we are learning a new skill, such as riding a bike, hitting a baseball, using a hammer".(Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 161).  "This sense has been called our 'sixth' or 'secret' sense" (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 161).

"Will Cather once wrote that novelists, actors and physicians have the 'unique and marvelous [experience] of entering into the very skin of another human being'...'You must enter into the person you are describing, into his very skin, and see the world through his eyes and feel in through his senses.'" (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 182)  This chapter in Root-Bernstein's book "Sparks of Genius" is titled Empathy.  That is what the above quotes from the chapter are referring to.  I believe that empathy is not simply something for novelists, actors, and physicians to experience, but rather, should be an experience that we all share consistently throughout our lives.  The more we can see the world through others eyes, the more well-rounded we become.  This idea is something that I need to adopt more in my classroom.

The idea of embodied thinking is something that is used in my classroom quite often.  I feel it lends itself well to reinforcing many different topics within science so when it came to thinking of an aspect of my topic (energy transfer) that could be represented by my body, the idea of energy transfer at a molecular level came to mind.  All molecules are in constant motion, weather they make up a solid, liquid or gas.  This motion is hard to conceptualize for some students, especially molecules that make up a solid.  To demonstrate this, I organized all of the students in one of my classes to represent molecules of water in the three phases of matter and filmed them interacting with each other.  I put those clips into a movie and added pictures that represent empathetic feelings of how the water molecules may feel as they experience these given phase changes.  It was a fun experience.  Below is my final product.

I feel that this video, and what is represented in it, is a good use of proprioceptive thinking and empathy as the students get to physically feel what molecules in a solid, liquid, and gas feel like and behave like.  If the molecules had human emotion, the students are able to create what those feelings might be and therefore empathize with them to truly understand the concept.  This is much more powerful than simply "telling" them how they interact or allowing them to read it.