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

by Donald Blumenfeld-Jones

Introduction


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." He went on to write that Gardner's reasoning was "astute and subtle." 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.