Rethinking Ancient Myths: a multiple intelligences approach

This blog aims at developing Gardner’s multiple intelligences within the curriculum of Secondary education.

According to Gardner, every person has eight different intelligences:

No individual has all of them developed at the same level and, within this approach, none of them is considered more important than the others. In life, it is argued, we need to use more than one intelligence in order to have a successful life.

Traditionally, schools focus mainly on the the Verbal/ Linguistic and Logical/ Mathematical Intelligences. This approach, according to Gardner, is inadequate to develop the fully potential of the students.

The reason that encouraged us, the teachers of IES Príncipe Felipe in Madrid, to develop this project is mainly that we want to understand our students' potential and take into consideration all of their abilities in our classes.

Together with these eight intelligences, our aim is to also develop a new intelligence " Information Technology Intelligence". Though not included in Gardner's ressearch, we believe that nowadays it is a basic "intelligence" that has to be developed in our students.

With this view of education in mind, we have developed a project that studies ancient myths devising activities and tasks that involve the eight “intelligences” plus the Information Techonology Intelligence.We have focused our work on the myth The Twelve Labors of Hercules.