How do I Love Thee? CEP 818 Response to “How do You Experience Your Topic?” Experiencing one’s topic is a great idea to generate creative responses. My topic is spatial description. In it, students will have to experience the room they’re going to describe through most of their senses. The best bet would be to use visual, although auditory, tactile and olfactory stimuli are all possible approaches. In the remaining part of the response, I’ll explain how students can use these different stimuli to approach spatial description in the best way that suits their senses. Visual stimulus This is the most common way of approaching spatial description. Though the most reliable, it certainly isn’t the only way. This approach appeals to visual students. The best way to describe a room visually is to encourage students to observe key elements in the room. That is, they’ll have to decide whether they want to describe it from the center moving outward, or whether they’d prefer to divide it into separate parts. Students using visual stimuli will be reminded to describe the room prioritizing what strikes their attention. They can choose to use an aerial view or on-the-ground view. The bottom line is students will rely on what they see to describe the room in order of visual preference. Auditory stimulus This approach appeals to students who prefer to rely on what the room ‘sounds’ like. Though a bit strange, some students can associate a sound or set of sounds with each section of the room. For example, they can identify a certain sound for the part containing the desk (rustling of paper, clicking of computer keyboard, printer sound) and another where the window is located (wind, moving curtains). This approach calls for an acute auditory perception of the room. Tactile stimulus Though less common than the two previous approaches, some students need to feel objects in their hands to produce a clear description of the room. Whereas they won’t be able to actually touch each object in the room, they can rely on what each feels like and then decide on a practical way to go about describing the room. This approach could be hard to imagine for
Created by: Jean-Claude Aura
Date: September 2010
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How do I Love Thee? CEP 818 people who are not kinesthetic, but it’s a sure pay off for those who are. Giving it a try won’t do any harm! Olfactory stimulus By all means the most uncommon, this approach could turn into a fun activity. Why not try to ‘smell out’ the room? After all, a printer and computer give off a different smell from a plant in the corner! And definitely a completely different smell from the furniture made of, let’s say, oak tree. Yeah, why not let students’ imagination go wild? With all these possible approaches in mind, students can try combining two or more of these suggested stimuli to come up with one-of-a-kind spatial description. After all, one would never know what might come out of such a creative description. As the saying goes, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”.
Created by: Jean-Claude Aura
Date: September 2010
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