Means of Suggestion

· A carefully orchestrated physical environment: an uncrowded room, aesthetically pleasing, well lighted, plants, fresh air, ...

· The teacher / doctor thoroughly trained in the art of suggestive communication -

with a well-developed sense of authority. (more details below)

· the ability to evoke a receptive, playful-, child-like state in the students / patients

· a mastery or double-plane behaviour, especially the ability to use appropriately and purposefully suggestive language, voice intonation, facial and body expression

· Music:

· Carefully integrated suggestive written materials.

· Visual stimuli: posters, pictures, charts, illustrations.

The arts offer us the greatest examples of unified suggestive expression, and we should make every effort to integrate them into the learning environment.

Suggestive authority

A positively suggestive authority is one of the most effective means which we as teachers / doctors can use, if we use it sensitively, wisely and purposefully.

The authority we are speaking of here has nothing to do with authoritarianism, traditional “strictness” or “toughness”. Lozanov defines it as “the non-directiveprestige which by indirect ways creates an atmosphere of confidence and intuitive desire to follow the set example”. Authority, in its positive, suggestive sense, is communicated through our “global” presence, through all our non-verbal as well as verbal signals. Students can sense when we embody the values and attitudes we “talk about”. And when there is congruency in the many levels of our communication, we become believable, compelling, worthy of respect.

Lozanov notes the parallel between the decisive suggestive power of the first session between physician or therapist and patient, and the first class session. Both patient and student come to their respective experiences with conditioned attitudes and beliefs - and with hopes and expectations. In that first encounter expectation and suggestibility are at their greatest. In the first session the climate is most favourable for suggesting that something new, something secretly or openly hoped for, something extraordinary is possible and probable. When we communicate in a simultaneous, congruent manner that we are confident with the material we are teaching, that we love what we are doing, that we respect the students who have come to learn, that we know they can learn it, and that we take delight in teaching - when we can communicate these things with our voices, facial expressions, posture, movement and words, we will achieve an invaluable rapport with our students, will arouse expectancy and motivation, and will establish a suggestive atmosphere within which the student’s mental reserve capacities can be tapped. (Self-fulfilling prophecy)

Infantilization

In suggestopedia we do not talk about infantilization in the clinical sense of the word, nor of infantility. Infantilization in the process of education is a normal phenomenon connected with authority (prestige). Infantilization in suggestopedia must be understood roughly as memories of the pure and naive state of a child to whom someone is reading, or who is reading on his own. He is absorbing the wonderful world of the fairytales. This world brings him a vast amount of information and the child absorbs it easily and permanently.

Intonation

Intonation is strongly connected with the rest of the suggestive elements. The intonation in music and speech is one of the basic expressive means, with formidable form-creating influence and potential in many psycho-physiological directions. “Learning is state of mind dependent”. When varying your voice you “reach” different “states of mind”.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 936