Challenging Environments

For the blind person darkness itself would not cause the same level of challenge that a seeing person might encounter. If we include extra sensory perceptions such as thoughts and feelings, subtle body language and facial expressions, and physic perceptions as normal human perception, then each individual person’s perceptual skills, strengths and challenges become a very complex system to evaluate and understand.

Experiences described as aesthetically pleasing or enjoyable may thereby remain so unique to each person, place and time that it is hard to create these experiences for another person, even those we feel we know very well. In her book ‘Children dancing’  Rosemund Shreeves describes how rhythms arise out of movement and that through dance, children experience feelings of release and satisfaction not found in other activities.  She describes dance as: ‘body awareness and sensitivity; movement to follow; physical and emotional fitness; creativity in movement and thought; and response to the surrounding environment’. Further important aspects of dancing include, involvement and interaction; vitality and energy; and repeated enjoyment of the rhythmic sensation….The nonverbal quality of dance enhances concentration and awareness of the physical sensations of body-movement and touch. Dancing to music encourages flowing movements and requires a relaxation of unwanted body tensions and thereby encourages and extends spontaneous creativity. (Shreeves, 1990:12)How and when do consequential sounds or musical responses influence a person’s actions, sensory focus and subsequent learning?Therefore one may concede that multisensory learning can be directed by more than any specified learning environment.

Prioritising an Area of Perception

Further to the complexity of any individual’s perceptual abilities is the question of ability or failure to prioritise one area of perception over another. For example a person may choose to listen to someone speaking and not attend to what, at same time, the eyes see going on around them Conversely a person may not be able to attend/or hear what is being said because they are too distracted by what they can see happening around them. If a child finds it easier to recall verbal sounds than to recall visual pictures then does the verbal stimulus get priority attention over and above the corresponding visual information? If it is easier to learn something by doing it rather than recalling verbal or visual instructions does this give kinaesthetic experience priority over verbal and/or visual information?

Kinaesthetic interactions with sensory experiences are thought to promote our ability to accommodate sensory information. For example deaf children are taught sign language, however, if babies can learn to read one might ask ‘Why aren’t deaf children taught to communicate through our written language’. Similarly why are blind children taught brail as opposed to touch typing? If our kinaesthetic sense of proprioception, movement and touch is indeed dominant over the other senses, then the use of British signing and Brail can be presented as the best way of helping deaf and blind children to develop communication skills. On a simpler level each person may have a specific rating of sensory strengths and weaknesses that will influence their ability to learn according to the mode of presentation. For example a person with strong visual perceptual skills may learn to do complex puzzles more easily than reciting a poem, or a person how has strong auditory perception and weak visual skills they may remember verbal instructions but miss seeing the road signs when trying to find their way to a new location.

The Montessori didactic teaching materials present a strong focus on kinaesthetic experience. In the kindergarten materials focus on a specific area of sensory perception through a kinaesthetic experience e.g. the water jug and glasses pouring activity and the shape inset puzzle boards. The primary school materials are still strongly based on kinaesthetic experiences but the physical interaction and doing activities are now linked with a multi-sensory perspective. E.g. The countries of Europe are presented as separate pieces that fit together to form the map of Europe, and each country has its flag that can be placed on the puzzle map of Europe. Thus each country is learnt in the context of its spoken name, the written name, the design on its flag, its physical shape on the puzzle map and it position within the continent of Europe. Children may also be introduced to things that are special to each country: like traditional clothes, general life style, things of special interest e.g. tulips from Holland and the Eiffel Tower in France.

One could propose that children learning through a multi-sensory input of information are also encouraged to self-direct their learning through personalised creative interaction. This gives the learner an opportunity to prioritise use of their sensory perceptual strengths while developing their sensory perceptual weaknesses through a multi-sensory approach to kinaesthetic forms of interactive learning.

Multisensory scaffolding for learning through Self-Directed Discovery could be defined as follows:-

1. Creative activity.
2. Didactic materials that present co-ordinated structures of sensory information.
3. Authentic social and physical interaction.
4. Co-operative games.
5. The organic development of experiential projects of enquiry.

Multi-sensory activities embrace a wealth of sensory experience whereby motivation and focus are intrinsically directed by environmental scaffolding. Knowledge and skills are secondary to the abstract qualities of enjoyment and pleasures of participation. An expansive relationship with an indefinable potential presents qualities of creative engagement and supports future development of awareness. Creative consequences extend like an over-flowing river into new domains beyond perceived boundaries. Each individual’s unique human design is nurtured as a tender gift. Multi-sensory activities do not necessarily have a predetermined goal or measure of achievement. Sensory integration may embrace a spectrum of intelligence that is unacknowledged by the participant/s. Also, later aspects of learning may be directly attributed to a comprehensive aspect of earlier multi-sensory learning.

Didactic Multisensory Materials

The teaching benefits offered by multi-sensory didactic materials can be helpful to a wide age range, and a broad spectrum of ability and interest.

When multisensory materials are carefully designed they can intrinsically meet different styles of learning, different levels of skill, and sensory perceptual differences. The quality of independent child-directed learning supported by multisensory teaching materials may be influenced by the integration of the following factors:

1. A comprehensive integration of the human sensory spectrum
2. Physical movement and associated co-ordinated actions.
3. Supporting themes of associated conceptual understanding.
4. Incorporated strategies that help attention, reception and recall (memory skills and strategies).
5. A focus on personal motivation and participation.
6. Activity that promote meaningful challenges of enquiry, exploration and discovery.
7. A format that promotes a correct initial learning experience.
8. Intrinsic opportunities for correction of error.
9. Expansion into further associated creative activity and future intellectual development.

If multisensory materials meet the points listed above then the learner may gain a holistic experience that can be adapted to meet the individual needs and preferred style of learning. Scaffolding can meet the learner with a broad multisensory presentation and subsequently adult facilitation may be free from personal sensory strengths, learning preferences and interests. Thus, the learner can be less dependent upon adult support and the confinement of learning from another person’s perspective.

Future intellectual development

A further issue to consider within multisensory materials is whether the materials meet the required learning for future levels of ability without imposing areas of unlearning.

The author has created an alternative set of number rods for addition and subtraction operations, illustrated below.

These rods develop the concept that all number operations are founded on number bonds to ten: 1+9=10; 2+8=10; 3+7=10; 4+6=10; 5+5=10.