A guest post by David Perkins
David Perkins and I have worked together for 54 years, from the time that we were founding members of Harvard Project Zero—which we co-directed from 1972-2000. Over the more than half century, I have valued David’s collegiality and friendship—and, like everyone else we both know, I always learn from David when we converse or when he is giving one of his insightful talks.
And so, when I began to think seriously about ‘synthesizing’ and launched this blog, I asked David for some his own thoughts about the process of synthesizing. He responded almost immediately and has kindly given me permission to share his thoughts.
By David Perkins
First of all, I'm wondering if levels of synthesizing need to be recognized. There's the good compilation, where one can find briefs on any of the major themes in the realm in question. I'm inclined to think compilations don't really count as syntheses, but they surely are useful! Then there are revealing systematizations – an example might be Robert Sapolsky's Behave; this neuroscientist offers a convincing account of what shapes positive and negative behaviors relative to different timelines from seconds to evolutionary time. Strong efforts in that direction are to be treasured as delivering insight with scope.
But then there's the deeper kind of synthesis that seeks to reveal an unrecognized underlying logic or pattern. In the work of your group at Project Zero, the theory of multiple intelligences would be an example… Or the triple helix of good work—excellence, engagement, ethics. In the group that works with me, there's the "making learning whole" framework, which emphasizes authentic challenges in and across the disciplines at levels suited to the learners. Another example is the Klondike space model of creativity from The Eureka Effect, which charts four fundamental ways creative quests are 'unreasonable', resisting stepwise reasoning and demanding other bolder strategies of navigation.
Riffing on the Klondike model a bit, I'd lean toward seeing the psychological mechanism of synthesis as having a lot to do with goal structure and the style of goals a person finds magnetic and embraces. A deeper synthesis is a certain style of goal, entailing a certain quality of not-so-tractable questing. It means asking certain kinds of big questions like "What are the troublesome puzzles or anomalies or annoying disorders that bother me in how this realm is usually mapped and understood?" and "How might they be addressed in a revealing way?" It means risking one’s getting lost in the trees while trying to see the evasive forest. It means choosing the forest for your quest; in the academic life, that implies not spending all your time on a particular tree or grove – revealing though that also can be, not to mention the safest path to academic advancement.
For an especially tricky desideratum, it means watching out for your version of the forest not including nearly as much of the forest as hoped. Some syntheses seem to me to deliver good insight as far as they go, while exercising a kind of imperialism, claiming tacitly or explicitly to comprehend a decidedly greater range than they do. Which doesn't mean that they aren't worthwhile.
LINKS
Website dedicated to the theory of multiple intelligences from Howard Gardner
Blog post on "Intertwining Multiple Intelligences and Good Work" by Howard Gardner
"Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education" by David Perkins
Klondike Spaces in "The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking" by David Perkins
“Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst” by Robert Sapolsky