Clusters & Mind Maps

Gabriella Rico, back in 1983, wrote a book about the use of Clusters for creative writing. She showed how this free–flowing, non–organisational visual tool can be used to unblock creativity.

Clusters are all about generating ideas. Not about organising them. All you have to do is jot down, and link, any associated thought. There’s no attempt to edit, let alone organise, the material generated. In fact you could say that any such intention threatens the very the creativity you’re trying to unleash.

Mind maps are also promoted as a means of generating ideas by working in this associative way. However, they are also promoted as an organisational tool. Something doesn’t seem right here.
Let’s take a look at an example of both visual tools. One is from Rico herself and the other is from Joyce Wycoff, mindmapping author.

My analysis shows that while Rico does work in a stream of ideas method, she also begins to organise the material with an early category formation. Wycoff uses categories and lists. Her categories are not very formed and are disguised by the imagery that she asserts are essential props for creativity and memory (more on that in a later article).

This lack of a real difference between the two visual tools is the reason why mind mapping is so poorly understood and practiced in schools. Students are unclear of the different purposes and methods of generating ideas and organising them.

As a result the preparatory thinking of their maps lack the structure to support their writing. A collection of associations may generate a great deal of ideas but that is very short of being adequate for a reasoned piece of writing.

For this reason, we recommend students write their words in bubbles when generating ideas in a Cluster. And write on lines when organising them. That way, both teacher and student knows which stage of thinking they’re working on.

The Language of Categories and Thinking

This week’s edition of the New Scientist has an interesting article on how we talk to ourselves (Your Inner Voice).

Several pieces of research point out just how crucial the language of categories is to our thinking. While labeling individual items is a factor in the development of our intelligence, that of categories is stronger still.

Infants, for example, are more effective at grouping objects if they already have the names for the categories. It’s as if having the category names greatly aids the thinking involved in sorting the actual objects. And in another study, youngsters were better at spatial reasoning if armed with prepositions.

Equally, adults who have lost their language skills through having a stroke are no longer as able to categorise objects.

Furthermore, memory is also affected by the acquisition of category words as memory itself is, by nature, categorical. We tend not to remember specific details.

So what does this mean for schools? For a start review the foolish devaluing of categorizing as mere information processing: a so–called lower order thinking skill. And realise that it’s a life–long task to master the skill.

After all, just because a toddler is able to sort toy animals from toy vehicles doesn’t mean they no longer need to be explicitly taught to categorise.

And what better way to learn to categorise with increasingly complex subject matter than with model maps? The visual and spatial structures are perfect for discussion and deep reasoning.

What do categories reveal about the mind?

Quite a lot thinks George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

That very title, for example, is a grouping of items in an Australian aboriginal language that has coherence and meaning only in that culture.  To us, of course, such a collection is pretty meaningless. But to this particular aboriginal tribe the category is a reality.

More than that Lakoff argues, categories create our reality.

So when did humans first learn to categorize? Aristotle is reckoned to be the first categorizer but Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages argues that primitive taxonomies of the natural world pre–dated Aristotle by thousands of years. And determined his intellectual innovation.
But how did humans get to a position to be able to do this early classification? Just how did they learn to develop this skill?

It’s here that it gets very interesting. Pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that tribal societies had a deep unconscious need to project their family and kinship structures onto the world. Genealogy, you see, provides the perfect tool for classification.

Durkheim found, also in Australia, that aboriginal tribes categorized their natural world with a mirror system of their own tribal organization. They simply overlaid the family tree structure.

Over time this framework became the mental tool humans used to organise information about the word in order to make sense of it. Categorising was, and is, our foremost meaning–making tool.
Interesting, you might think, but what has this to do with Graphic Organisers and visual thinking?

In a future article I’ll outline what Model Learning has found in schools regarding the lack of insight teachers have of this central role of categorisation in children’s understanding. And how this accounts for the very limited impact of mind mapping in raising achievement in literacy and thinking skills.  Oh, and what to do about it.

References:
Durkheim, E. & Mauss, (1963) Primitive Classification, University of Chicago Press
Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press
Wright, A. (2007),  Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Joseph Henry Press