Howard Gardner: Knowledge, learning and development in drama and arts education

In recent years Howard Gardner has become a favourite arts education guru who has produced a prodigious volume of work to support educators in general and arts educators in particular. His theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) has afforded welcome support to educators and parents who want to see their children as equals no matter in what area of ability they develop competence. His advocacy of the arts as a cognitive area of equal importance to science has also been welcomed by arts teachers to support claims for the validity of their respective arts subjects, which they have always advocated but backed with mainly anecdotal evidence. In this article, the authors' purpose is to probe the usefulness of Gardner's approach, based as it is on Kantian notions of the power of mind to give order to the world, where the world is subsumed into the symbol systems that create it. The authors also relate this to the social constructionist approaches where the world is created through language in particular. More importantly, they wish to contrast both of these approaches, which are philosophically idealist, to the dialectical materialist approach of Vygotsky, where sign and symbol systems are seen as means to mediate reality and which work to reflect reality in human consciousness. The authors see significant implications for practice in arts education and in particular how the growing child is to be able to deal with the world as it is rather than as it is given to the child through the media, dominant ideology etc. They start to draw attention to these towards the end of the article.