Play to their emotions. Tell an interesting story. Humanize the facts. A formula for imaginative learning.

Egan, Kieran
Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992

I’m really bad at remembering dates. For me, there is a big holiday in late December and I was married sometime in the spring. I get a phone call every year from my mother, where she really has nothing to say but surreptitiously remarks about what she’s planning for my father’s birthday. It’s a reminder to send a card. Many people have difficulty grasping my deficiency, but I have a theory of how it developed.

My 10th grade U.S. history teacher’s idea of educating his class was to stand in front of a podium and read, verbatim in a monotone voice, from a textbook littered with names and dates. The stories were few and far between and the delivery was dull. I apparently caused some trouble in this class, though I have no recollection of what I did. I do remember sitting down with this teacher and watching my father argue my point that I could always look up a date if I needed to, so why waste my brain space memorize them. And, being the diligent student that I was, I had read the exact same text, as instructed, the night before. So why did I need to be in class anyway? In the third chapter of Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years, Egan identifies several key characteristics of imagination in young people around the ages of 8 to15. They include wonder, awe, romance, revolt, idealism, and association with the heroic. My textbook had none of this, nor did my teacher interject it. There was no imagination present.

There are three points that struck me poignantly that I will carry with me from Egan’s book: 1) the role of emotions and need for emotional engagement in educating the imagination; 2) the importance of narrative in imaginative learning; and, 3) the connection between objective knowledge and imaginative thought.

In his book, Egan equates imaginative teaching with engaging stories, as opposed to blocks of knowledge to be sorted, acquired, and graded. He encourages teachers to look at their lessons and units in terms of narrative structure and highlight the human importance of the topic or subject. Objective knowledge and imagination, however, are not divorced. Reason and logic, as well as memory, emotion, and sensation, are necessary components of imagination and, he deduces, imagination greatly enriches rational thinking. “To be imaginative, then, is not to have a particular function highly developed, but it is to have heightened capacity in all mental foundations. It is not, in particular, something distinct from reason, but rather it is what gives reason flexibility, energy, and vividness” (page 65).

How do these separate functions marry together in the classroom? And how can teachers use the conventional tools that aren’t likely to disappear, such as worksheets, textbooks, or standardized exams, to allow for and lead to thinking about what is possible, as well as what is actual? In chapter four, Egan lays out a method of planning, or “framework” as he calls it, as a way to incorporate the characteristics of imagination into teaching content and/or skill to middle school students. Subsequent chapters take parts of the framework and illustrate how they could be utilized within, and incorporated into, any planning process for a lesson or a unit of study. I found this more helpful than the full framework and could image the possibilities for implementation. Also offered are examples of how the framework could be applied to various subjects including biology, social studies, language arts, and mathematics.

The structure of the book serves as a good example for what we, as teachers, should be doing with our 8-15 year-old students to train them in making connections. The author is thorough in summarizing and foreshadowing throughout the book, clarifying his intent and referencing past work or writing in similar areas.

In closing, here’s an opposing story to my first that further illustrates Egan’s points. Though dates slip my mind, I will always remember the relative densities of H2O and H2SO4 (water and sulfuric acid). I was one of several students that my 10th grade chemistry teacher would allow into the lab after school. We’d been instructed to add sulfuric acid to water, but reversed the process producing a bubbling spitting mess. Cleaning up was tedious, but we felt rebellious and heroic, experienced some amazement and adventure, and had a great story to tell our friends.

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