Point-Of-View

One concept that a great many educators--especially those in urban and innercity schools--use today is to identify more precisely the environmental imprint a student brings to class before deciding exactly how to teach a specific subject. I said a great many because there are also many teachers who do not necessarily ascribe to this idea and don't use it. In educational jargon, environmental imprint refers to the experiences, ideas, opinions, and knowledge base a student already has in reference to a specific topic and will use as a point of departure when taking in, processing, and learning the material presented. In my experiences teaching throughout the world within the Department of Defense, a large urban school district, and in a private school whose mission is to provide a college preparatory education to learning different students, this concept is quite valid and an important tool every teacher needs to have in their personal toolbox of teaching techniques. Whether they use it or not is a personal choice that may be situationally or preferentially determined, but the tool must be available and ready to use when needed or desired.

A personal and--I think--humorous example of how one's environmental imprint affects learning occurred to our family while living in Europe in the early 1990's. We were living in Sembach, Germany, at the time, and my wife and I decided to take our two younger sons on a train trip to Paris. It was in November and an added bonus to our trip was for our family to experience the French celebration of Armistice Day--what we refer to as Veterans Day. Armistice Day is a national celebration for the signing of the armistice ending World War I on 11 November 1918 and the end to a horrific struggle which haunts many to this day. However, the importance of one's environmental imprint became apparent to my wife and I when we took our sons to the Louvre to see Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and the many other masterpieces housed in that former royal palace. Much to our surprise, our youngest, a very intelligent ADHD child, soon discovered a greater interest in the name plates placed beside the many works of art than in the artistic pieces themselves. Imagine our puzzlement at this unexpected turn of events...until we realized what he was doing. As it turned out, he was most fascinated in anything by the artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael Sanzio, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Donatello di Nicolo Bardi. Why? Because at six years of age, he was both surprised and delighted that so many of what were considered important works of art had been created by his favorite comic heroes at that time, the Ninja Turtles--Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Donatello.

Reflectively, watching my son tour the Louvre on a journey of educational discovery tempered by an imaginary world he had come to embrace as a youngster made me realize just how potent and important the environmental imprint concept was to interest and learning. Today, my son is a junior in college who is continuing his pursuit of art on a personal journey that--I think--may have begun when he discovered the surreal blending of fantasy and reality he found in the galleries of the Louvre and the adventures of the Ninja Turtles.