Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence and Dance Education: Critique, Revision, and Potentials for the Democratic Ideal

Abstract

When Howard Gardner broached the idea of multiple intelligences in 1983, those of us in arts education enthusiastically embraced his thoughts. As an example, in the Journal of Aesthetic Education review of Gardner's book Frames of Mind, Marc H. Bornstein wrote that Gardner had begun to set aright the heavily parochial psychological view of intelligence as uniquely or exclusively logical and verbal.1 He went on to write that Gardner's reasoning was astute and subtle.2 This kind of admiration was echoed in the education circles within which I worked. In general the arts educators with whom I was familiar were grateful that their sense of the educational legitimacy of the arts was being demonstrated by a credible nonartist, that, as the above reviewer writes, there is more to a human being than his or her ability to compute or read or write. In this essay I do not intend to argue with that perspective. Rather, I intend to critically revisit Gardner's theory by performing a detailed analysis of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, in order to think about the place of dance education in a democracy and what dance educators might hope for in reference to that democracy. There is a long history of linking dance to democracy (H'Doubler, Hawkins, Turner, to name three dance thinkers) but these ways into the linkage tend to owe much to education theory and less to the actual experience of dancing the art form itself. What can be said for these dance educators can be said for Gardner as well. His work