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Kieran Egan
Introduction
A couple of days ago, as I was sitting wondering how to begin this book, my
two grandchildren were playing under my desk with some cardboard boxes they
had brought up from the basement. I know that in fifty years I’ll look
back at such moments as wonderfully rich experiences, but at the time it was
a bit irritating and a distraction, as I was anxiously trying to think about
how to start writing about education and imagination.
Then Joshua said, “This’ll be our house, OK, Jordan?”
“OK,” said Jordan.
And then they began an involved adventure that involved some “mom and
dad” talk, and after about ten minutes had them emerging to ask me to
cut out windows in one of the boxes, “and another bigger one for the
door.” The trouble with thinking about education and imagination, of
course, is that you are inclined not to notice it underfoot! I realized that
what had been distracting me was exactly what I was supposed to be thinking
about. How do we bring that easy imaginative engagement of young children
to the learning of algebra and history and so on throughout their years of
schooling? That is what I think I know how to do, and that is what this book
is about.
A New Approach to Teaching and Learning
The main idea here is that engaging students’ imaginations is crucial
to successful learning. If we want to be able to routinely engage students’
imaginations in learning, we must understand the main cognitive tools they
have available for the task We must shape our lessons to take advantage of
their cognitive and help develop those tools further.
Imagination is too often seen as something peripheral to the core of education,
something taken care of by allowing students time to “express themselves”
in “the arts,” while the proper work of educating goes on in the
sciences and math and in developing conventionally efficient literacy. In
the approach described here, imagination is at the center of education; it
is seen as crucial to any subject, mathematics and science no less than history
and literature. Imagination can be the main workhorse of effective learning
if we yoke it to education’s central tasks.
Of course, everyone knows that engaging students’ imaginations in learning
is one key to successful teaching. Over the years we have seen many suggestions
for how to do this, but making its achievement a routine part of the classroom
experience has proven quite elusive. The aim of this book, and of the Web
site that supports it—and of the series of books I hope will follow—is
to make imaginative teaching and learning accessible to everyone in a new
way.
This approach is unique in two important ways: It provides a new way of understanding
how students’ imaginations work in learning, and it does so in a way
that suggests specific teaching techniques. This book includes frameworks
and examples that support teachers in planning lessons and units that engage
students’ imagination and emotions.
The mention of emotions might be a bit unexpected, but it is crucial because
the imagination is tied in complex ways with our emotional lives. Students
don’t need a throbbing passion for learning algebra or a swooning joy
in learning about punctuation, but successful education does require some
emotional involvement of the student with the subject matter. All knowledge
is human knowledge and all knowledge is a product of human hopes, fears, and
passions. To bring knowledge to life in students’ minds we must introduce
it to students in the emotional context [KE: I prefer the original]in which
it finds its fullest meaning. The best tool for doing this is the imagination.
This book is about how we can ensure this happens routinely in every classroom
every day.
A Very Brief History of Learning
But getting to this new approach has not been easy. I suppose our educational
problems began about a quarter of a million years ago—not that I intend
to work up to the present year by year. According to the current evolutionary
story, that was the period of the last rapid burst of brain growth in our
hominid ancestors. This growth presented a particular problem to half the
members of our ancestors’ societies. The female pelvis had to widen
to allow these bigger-brained babies to be born, but it couldn’t widen
so much that rapid walking would become difficult or impossible. For some
reason, having bigger brains gave a significant advantage to these hominids,
and so those with the bigger brains had more chances to have children, and
so the brain growth continued. But there was obviously a limit to how far
the architecture of the female pelvis could accommodate to what might well
be an evolutionary advantage but was a major pain in childbirth. The pain
has remained, but a solution of a kind was worked out.
The solution was that humans began to give birth while their babies’
brains were immature, and the bulk of the brain’s growth took place
outside the womb. You can get a sense of the scale of this solution by comparing
modern human brains and their growth with that of our chimpanzee cousins.
Both of us have a brain of about 350 cubic centimeters at birth. As it grows
to adulthood, the chimpanzee adds around another hundred cubic centimeters,
whereas the human adds well over a thousand cubic centimeters, and most of
that growth occurs in the first few years of life.
What is going on? What is the use of all this extra brain tissue that has
cost so many of our species so much pain and trouble? It seems to be tied
up with symbols, or at least a lot of it is. Unlike all other species, we
are fantastically clever at associating sounds and images with meanings. Clever
us. But this is also the source of nearly all our educational problems. Some
of the symbols we learn and use seem fairly simple for us. Indeed, they are
so simple that we cannot not learn them in normal circumstances. In a language-using
environment, children cannot fail to learn the language or languages used
around them. If two languages are in use, they will learn them both and hardly
ever confuse them. Quite remarkable.
Language and Literacy
After a couple of hundred thousand years or more—I told you the history
would move fast—people invented ways of representing language in written
symbols. This is an enormously clever trick, later made even more useful by
some people in the east of the Mediterranean who simplified the symbols to
represent the sounds of language. The ancient Greeks brought this trick to
even greater refinement by constructing a compact alphabet learnable by almost
everyone. We haven’t made any significant advance on their alphabet
since. The trouble with this clever trick is that it both justified the profession
of educator and left us with some subtle and not-so-subtle problems to deal
with.
The not-so-subtle problems appear when we set about teaching children to read
and write alphabetic symbols and recognize how they resemble oral language
as means of representing thoughts and feelings and conveying information.
If we work hard at this, or make the children work hard, most of them can
pick up the basic trick quite quickly. They can learn to read the oddly shaped
lines and dots and squiggles as having specific meanings. But the more subtle
problems become evident when we realize that this basic skill acquisition
is only the beginning of the business of literacy. The more subtle problems
are tied up with the kind and degree of meaning students can learn, and the
problems extend even to such issues as teaching literacy so that students
will enjoy engaging with it. If they don’t find that the skill provides
rewards of pleasure, of course, it will not develop in the ways necessary
for what we consider some of the central purposes of education.
This might seem like an excessively refined thing for a teacher to worry about
while struggling with the problems of ensuring basic literacy in unsupportive
conditions. Working with students whose families read little, or for whom
the purposes of education play little role in the life around them, doesn’t
often leave much time or mental space to dwell on how to make the experience
return pleasure as well as utility to the student. The latter is often triumph
enough.
Recent British experience gives a hint of why we shouldn’t consider
this too refined a problem. Enormous efforts were made, and largely imposed
on teachers, to increase literacy scores. They were, over a decade, quite
successful. Britain moved upward in those international comparative tests.
But another survey result found that British children still score much lower
than others in terms of the amount of voluntary reading they do. Thus many
countries that now score worse than Britain in basic literacy have much higher
proportions of children who actually read for pleasure.
And that’s only one small slice of the problem, of course. The rest
is connected to the enormous diversity of human knowledge and experience that
is coded in symbols. The trick of literacy is one key to that great storehouse,
but the storehouse has many inner doors and byways, and having the key to
the front door allows one only into the front hall, not into any of the rich
rooms that lead from it. Crude literacy tests often miss the subtle problem
with which literacy has left us. They count as unqualified successes many
cases where students can manage the coding and decoding skills that open the
big front door of literacy’s storehouse without being equipped to go
into the further rooms where its great delights and power are accessible.
Theoretic Thinking
Well, that’s the first quarter million years dealt with. We have learned
two great tricks in the course of that time; one is communicating with oral
language, and the other is communicating with symbols stored outside our bodies.
More recently, we have learned a third great trick, which I’ll call
theoretic thinking. This trick involves abstracting ideas and theories from
the particulars of any area of knowledge and manipulating the abstractions
according to certain rules and then applying the results of that theoretic
thinking back to the particulars we started from. You will be using this trick
while reading some parts of this book. One problem with this trick, which
we are only too familiar with, is that it is easy to zoom off into abstractions
that don’t adequately capture the particulars we want to think about,
and then attempts to apply the results of the thinking are often worse than
useless.
Doing this theoretic thinking well requires a person to begin by becoming
very good at the first two tricks. The following chapters look at these great
tricks in some detail—not analyzing them so much as illustrating what
they bring with them and what they can tell us about how to educate our young,
and not so young. These tricks are like master tools of our mental lives—like
those screwdrivers that come with multiple bits designed to deal with many
different kinds of screws. If language and literacy and theoretic thinking
are three great multipurpose cognitive tools, it is also useful to look at
a number of the smaller-scale tools that come with them. Or, in terms of the
two metaphors I have been casually using so far, what are some of the multiple
bits that can be fitted to these great tools, or what are the other keys that
unlock the doors to the range of riches to which language and literacy and
theoretic thinking provide initial access?
Frameworks for Teaching
Now these are very grand themes, yet this book is largely about principles
of teaching and about practice, techniques, and frameworks for planning. But
while it shows how the teacher can plan in such a way as to engage students’
imaginations routinely, the techniques and frameworks are just means to an
end; they are not the ends in themselves. The frameworks that I describe and
exemplify are of use because they embody the principles of imaginative education.
They are to be seen as crutches to help one take the first steps if needed.
They are to help move along and show how the principles can be relatively
easily put into practice. Once the teacher becomes familiar with the principles,
then the frameworks can be left behind. That is, they are not to become some
straitjacket for planning, but they are useful as reminders of the principles
and the array of cognitive tools available for engaging students’ imaginations
in learning.
I should acknowledge that the drive for improved test scores is commonly seen
as incompatible with developing students’ imaginations. In times when
educational success is measured in terms of high scores on particular kinds
of tests, it may seem that developing students’ imaginations is a luxury
no teacher can afford. My aim here is to show how increased focus on students’
imaginations will lead to improvements in all measures of educational achievement,
including the most basic standardized tests.
A Map of the Book
The three main chapters describe some of the characteristics, or “cognitive
tools,” of students’ imaginations. The first set, described in
Chapter One, is made up of the tools that come along with an oral language.
Chapter Two deals with a set of tools that come along with literacy, and Chapter
Three focuses on those that come along with theoretic thinking. This breakdown
is not derived from a traditional developmental theory, in which the characteristics
unfold at particular ages. Rather it is tied to a new kind of theory of educational
development (see Egan, 1997) in which the acquisition of cognitive tools drives
students’ educational progress. Most commonly the cognitive tools described
in Chapter One will be found in young children before literacy begins to significantly
influence their thinking. This tends to occur between ages seven and nine
in Western societies, so Chapter One refers to children from the time they
begin to use oral language fluently till about age seven, eight, or nine.
The cognitive tools described in Chapter Two are most commonly found after
literacy has become fluent, between roughly ages seven to nine and fourteen
to sixteen in Western cultures. The third set of cognitive tools tends to
be developed in Western cultures in the senior high school and college years,
most fully by students who have most fully picked up the previous sets of
tools.
After each of the three chapters I have inserted a “half” chapter.
These are designed to show the practical relevance of the cognitive tools
explored in the corresponding main chapter. In the “half” chapters
I show samples of moving from the cognitive tools to frameworks that can guide
imaginative planning and teaching.
Two final points to conclude a too-long introduction: This book is describing
an approach to teaching, so throughout I will be looking at the classroom
from the teacher’s perspective and emphasizing how teachers can use
this material to make their work easier and more powerful. Similarly I will
be focusing on what the teacher can do to encourage imaginative engagement
and successful learning, and how lessons and units can be planned to achieve
this end. This doesn’t mean that I see students as simply passive recipients
of teachers’ work, nor that students can’t become involved in
the shaping of lessons nor in contributing in all kinds of ways. For economy
of space, however, I will write almost entirely from the teacher’s perspective,
and leave it to you to see the ways in which what I am describing can be adapted
to suit the active students we typically face in classrooms, especially if
their imaginations are engaged in what they are learning.
And the final point is to assure you I will be describing what I mean by “cognitive
tools” in more detail in the first chapter. And for that and other terms
I use, the Glossary at the back of the book will provide a ready reference.
