Example Blog Post 2: Savini & “Learning Styles”
I wanted to provide another sample blog post for this week, and I thought I’d do so by talking about something that is causing me to rethink the way that I teach: the recent counter-evidence to teaching via “learning styles.”
As early as my training to work as a writing center tutor, and in fact as far back as my own days in high school, I have been taught that different learners have different “learning styles” and that teaching to these styles can help students access content. For example, say we have three students who are assigned a book to read. A visual learner might do fine reading this text online, an aural learner might do best listening to an audiobook recording, and a tactile learner might prefer a physical copy of the book to dogear and write in. This was also expanded to make general claims about students’ subject preferences. Tactile-kinesthetic learners, for instance, were arguably more inclined to hands-on classes like pottery, shop, or phys. ed.
However, recently some of my fellow instructors here at UK mentioned that this separation of individuals into different learning types isn’t really helpful. “Learning styles” were more myth than fact. I realized that, apart from some pedagogy materials I’d been given years ago, I had never done any research to verify these learning or teaching methods. Not only was I concerned that I may have done harm by misguiding students (I have, in the past, asked students to reflect on what learning styles work best for them), I was also faced with at least one (of a possible many) teaching methods that I had taken for granted—a scotosis in my own pedagogy.
In developing research questions to address this issue, I wondered what made “teaching styles” a bogus concept, how it had come to be popularized, if its teaching was actively harmful or simply mistaken, and if there were alternative ways to reflect on and understand the learning methods of students and self. I also wanted to know where my peers found out that “teaching styles” is bunk—a question easily asked and answered.
Here is an article from the Guardian and another from the Atlantic on this issue.
Here is an excerpt from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching’s website on the question, “Why are [learning styles] so popular?”
First, people like to identify themselves and others by “type.” Such categories help order the social environment and offer quick ways of understanding each other. Also, this approach appeals to the idea that learners should be recognized as “unique individuals”—or, more precisely, that differences among students should be acknowledged—rather than treated as a number in a crowd or a faceless class of students (p. 107). Carried further, teaching to different learning styles suggests that “all people have the potential to learn effectively and easily if only instruction is tailored to their individual learning styles” (p. 107).
It’s clear to see here why I, too, considered learning styles valuable: I support a flexible classroom that is attentive to students’ needs and responds to them in order to help facilitate effective communication and comprehension of lessons. My ability to achieve this flexible classroom is part of what is at stake in this conversation on learning styles, but I feel that knowing better how these styles are meant to work versus how they fail to work (or at least are failed to be proven) is a more responsible way to practice pedagogy than using these styles uncritically.