Do I favour specific cognitive tools in learning? Do some of us use some cognitive tools to make sense of our world while others of us use a different set?
Today we completed an imaginative self-assessment. We were asked to list which cognitive tools we used easily and which ones were foreign to us. We thought about understandings that we gravitated to and others that we didn’t.
I hadn’t thought about cognitive tools in this way before,at least not as being connected with learning or personality types. Before today, I understood that somatic, mythic, romantic, etc., tools developed along with literacy. Although we would use bits and pieces of them throughout our lives in different learning situations, the use of the tools seemed to depend on the nature of the activity not on the character of the student. Today’s self-assessment looked at cognitive tools not by how/when they would be used but by who would use them; the suitability of each tool to individual learners.
My task was to try to figure out what kind of tool(s) I generally felt most comfortable using. This was hard. It was acknowledged that we are complex by nature and not one cognitive tool would fit us exactly. This made sense. I wandered around our class conversing with people, asking them where they pegged themselves. It quickly became evident that no one felt they could identify with just one tool. I did feel a connection with a group of people who saw themselves as “philosophically mythic”. That is, we try to make sense of our world by looking for general causal chains and networks that show us how things connect (that is the processing characteristic of the philosophic tool). But, we also identified the need to find these connections through metaphor and story (those are characteristics from the mythic tools).
A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought of myself as a “philosophically mythic” learner, but this revelation has been slowly forming in my mind as I study more and interact with others who I see take on learning in ways different from me.
The last task we were given was to name our group. We chose “Box of Chocolates”. Like a box of chocolates we come with a variety of personalities, flavours and cognitive tools.(I do also enjoy somatic experiences and perhaps am a little romantic at heart).