The Synthesizing Mind

Gardner states,  “that the most ambitious form of synthesis occurs in interdisciplinary work” (Gardner, 2007, p. 53).   He says that for work to be considered  “genuinely interdisciplinary” it needs to have a “proper combination of at least two disciplines” (Gardner, 2007, p.53). 

I am not certain that this was the “proper combination” but the project we took on as part of our Social Studies and Language Arts unit on Greece did seem to produce a high level of engagement, students did collaborate and share their individual expertise, and the end result for each group did seem to bring new understanding.

Students read about Ancient Greece in their textbooks and on a ThinkQuest website. Then they broke down how the 10 Cultural Universals are represented in that early civilization. As part of their study regarding the ancient Greeks’ attitude toward the unknown, students read myths and viewed videos of myths from Discovery Education Streaming. 

After discussing the Greek Pantheon and completing character study activities for the Gods and Goddesses, students were strategically grouped to compose their own myths from Mount Olympus Middle School.  They designed a storyboard with penciled illustrations and text notes. After each group was satisfied with the story line of their myth, they used the digital cameras from the library to recreate their pencil drawings as a still shot photograph of the group members posed to depict each scene.

The students uploaded each photo to www.storyjumper.com , and added their text notes to the opposite page. The groups continued to work together to discuss, argue, revise, and ultimately improve their myths from notes to complete sentences, to pages and finally to published stories.  The links to the myths on StoryJumper were shared in the team’s weekly newsletter so that the other groups and parents could read and view the product of each collaboration.

Combining their background knowledge of Greece from social studies research and their understanding of myth and character from language arts with their skills of technology, storytelling, and basic writing mechanics, students were able to collaborate to learn and create something new.

It was interesting and refreshing to see how capable the students were at conveying their understanding of the Greek perception of the Gods’ and Goddesses’ personalities, their understanding of myths as a genre, and their deeper understanding of how the ancient Greeks viewed nature, mortality, and immortality. 

The purest representation of synthesis in this exercise came from the students’ collective ability to join the story of an ancient civilization and connect it to their own modern day myth.  One student, who regularly contributes “What ifs?” to the class discussion, made me smile when she said,  “What if a class 4,000 years from now finds our myth, and thinks that we really believed all this?!”

An example of one of the original myths from Mt. Olympus Middle School can be found at the following link: Persephone and Hades

Gardner, Howard. (2007). Five minds for the future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.