Review: An Imaginative Approach to Teaching

What is the role of imagination in education and learning? Certainly imagination is desirable for educators who would like their young students to grow into creative, interesting adults. Imagination is probably also desirable for students who have a great wish not to be bored to death. But could it be more than just an antidote to classroom doldrums and later-life ennui?

I have a friend and colleague currently doing a teacher training course in which he was given an assignment to write on the topic, "What is reflection? How can reflection help teachers?". The question was enraging.

Indeed, reflection seems like it might be a useful practice for teachers. How might thinking help teachers? How might breathing help teachers? This is the kind of pablum that passes for teacher training.¹ If gaining a license to teach is school is simply intended as a costly signal then perhaps this kind of generic busywork is fine, but what if teacher training could be more effective?

Allow me to circle back and ask : What is imagination? How can imagination help teachers? Kieran Egan thought this question was so important that he named his educational theory after it. He also wrote An Imaginative Approach to Teaching to try and disseminate his ideas and practices.

According to Egan, "Engaging the imagination is not a sugar-coated adjunct to learning; it is the very heart of learning. It is what brings meaning and context and understanding to the knowledge we wish to teach."

Kieran Egan was an educational philosopher and teacher. He is probably best known for his theory of "cultural toolkits", (sometimes also referred to as cognitive toolkits or tools of understanding). These toolkits outline various forms of understanding that have emerged over the course of human history. The idea stems both from anthropology and from Lev Vygotsky, who asserted that all learning is culturally-mediated and that different cultures utilize different mental techniques to conceptualize, process and transmit ideas. 

According to Egan these intellectual techniques (cultural tools) could be grouped into toolkits characterized by stages of development of cognition, language and literacy. The 5 cultural toolkits are somatic (pre-verbal), mythic (language), romantic (literacy), philosophic (theoretic) and ironic (metacognitive).

An Imaginative Approach to Teaching is not, however, intended as a book of theory. Egan wrote it as a practical manual for teachers that outlines these different types of cultural understanding and the book provides structures for planning lessons.

The book is structured around the three toolkits most likely to emerge during school ages: tools of language (also mythic), tools of literacy (romantic tools) and theoretic (philosophic). Each of these forms understanding is explained and presented with a list of techniques. After each chapter on a given toolkit, there are example units suggesting how to implement the tools in various subjects.

One frustrating aspect of Egan's work is that it can be difficult to explain. Far better to give examples so reader can get a sense of the types of cognitive tools Egan was suggesting:

Cultural Tools of Language

Egan's mythic toolkit, in the book called cultural tools of language, emerges as students learn to speak and interact (generally ages 2-8), but it retains its relevance throughout life. It consists of these techniques:

story, metaphor, binary opposites, rhyme, rhythm & pattern, jokes & humor, mental imagery, gossip, play, and mystery

These tools for understanding have been passed down through oral cultures for thousands of years. Stories are the central technique of this stage for two reasons: First stories are memorable, perhaps the most memorable way to present information to human brains. Second, "Stories are instruments for orienting human emotions to their contents." Stories are uniquely good at making us care about what is being said and this has been since our dimmest ancestral memory. In fact, Egan would contend that "Instead of thinking of lessons or units as sets of objectives to attain, it is possible to think of them as good stories to tell in order to engage students' imaginations and emotions."

If story is the backbone of Egan's toolkit of language, then mystery is its spice. One issue with teaching, particularly in primary education, is that we teach from a perspective in which truth and knowledge are established, inert, picked-clean of any unsavory vestiges of uncertainty or disagreement. This is the most boring way possible to present information! How can we build students' curiosity if we present them only with answers but never any questions? Selectively witholding information can push students to want to learn the answers for themselves. For example, introduce a historical conflict without telling students who won or discuss a biological problem like keeping out bacteria before discussing the cell membranes. Either of these methods would be far more engaging than a simple list of causes and effects or adaptive features. One doesn't need to hold the key concepts back for long- just enough to trigger students' curiosity.

How do you actually use these tools in practice? I'm glad you asked.

Egan provides a framework for planning for each cultural toolkit. Here's one for tools of language (slightly abridged and including some of my own notes):

First Planning Framework - Cognitive Tools of Language (Mythic tools)

1. Locate emotional meaning: What is emotionally engaging about this topic? How can it evoke wonder?

2. Thinking about content in story form:How can we shape the content so it will have emotional meaning?

   1. a. Finding binary opposites: thematic conflict, etc. 

   2. Finding images, metaphors and drama: What image best captures the content and its dramatic contrasts? What metaphors can be used to enrich understanding?

3. Structuring the body of the lesson or unit: How do we teach the content in a story form? Would there be a better structure/tool(s) to make this more engaging?

   1. Locating material that can provide opportunities for gossip and play: gossip to enliven and enrich understanding, what aspects can be used for games, fantasy play or roleplaying?

   2. Developing embryonic forms of later cognitive tools: see tools of literacy

4. Conclusion: What is the best way to conclude the lesson or unit?

   1. Bringing the story to a satisfying end: How does the story end? How to resolve the conflicting binary themes? 

   2. Suggesting the mystery behind the topic: How much do we explain / leave as mystery? Should we explicitly mention themes or perhaps suggest further mysteries?

5. Evaluation: How can we know whether the topic has been understood, content learned?

I think that it's worth noting that each framework starts with the a question about how the topic is important, or relevant, or how it stimulates wonder in the learner. This is the most important point for Egan. If a teacher cannot answer why the topic is important/relevant/wondrous then we either need a new approach or a better topic. Relevant doesn't just mean something that will help you on college entrance exams or job interviews, but something connected to our lives, our emotions, or our conception of the world. 

If you are curious, there are more detailed frameworks available online at the Center for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education.

Let's look at an example of the framework in practice: a mathematics lesson on the topic of place value.  

In my experience, the two hardest aspects of the whole structure are identifying what makes the topic important (creating emotional resonance) and employing a story/narrative format to present information. Each of these are especially topic-dependent, but one thing Egan suggests is to examine an aspects of the topic people typically take for granted.

For place-value, Egan highlights the ingenuity of the idea and for a binary opposite contrasts cluelessness and how seemingly simple tasks such as counting would be impossible without it. He then creates a story about a king who needs to know the size of his army in a time before large numbers. The king's councillors are clueless but his daughter ingeniously drops stones in a series of bowls to represent place value.

Egan points out that 'story' need not be interpreted only as a fictional tale or parable like the one presented above. Rather, he intends it more as story in the journalistic sense: What is the narrative or angle that provides interest, that humanizes the topic? Indeed, concern for humanism in education suffuses Egan's work.

Two other cultural toolkits are introduced in the following chapters: tools of literacy (the romantic toolkit) and theoretic tools (the philosophic toolkit). They are structured similarly, with the majority of each chapter enumerating the various techniques and explaining the appeal for students and teachers.

Tools of Literacy

Conceptually, tools of literacy draw on a much wider body of information than the mythic tools of oracy. These tools tend to become important as learners begin using reading as a primary means of accesssing new information, often from the ages of 8 to around 15. They include new tools like heroic qualities or ideals and revolt. However, aspects of the previous mythic toolkit return: story is included now as narrative, with more complexity and more explicit structure, mystery returns no longer centered on the unknown, but as a sense of wonder and awe at reality itself. Binary opposites are transformed into an obsession extremes, limits and records.

According to Egan, this period is characterized by newfound sense of the extremes and limits of reality. Of course, children are aware of reality before the age of 8, but it takes on a new salience and importance when they have access to written facts. Explanations become necessary where before stories worked just as well. These learners, to Egan, seek out the weird, the extraordinary as a means to define the limits of the possible and map the extent of reality. 

This period is also one where many students lose the passion they once had for learning. They develop their own heroes and talents and goals and fail to see the relevance of academic study. Egan presents a number of techniques to help humanize knowledge. Highlighting heroes and heroic qualities can make topics more appealing to students seeking role models.² Identifying ideals and how new discoveries often consist of revolts against convention can appeal to students who seek identity, independence and change. Egan often focuses on how knowledge was discovered, by whom and for what purposes: 

“Instead of representing knowledge to the newly literate as a given- telling them the rules for comma use or mathematical operations and making them do exercises till they get the rules right- you can make the knowledge memorable and meaningful by re-embedding it in the contexts of its original invention or human uses.”

This idea may seem obvious but I think that contextualizing and humanizing knowledge is often something that happens at the end of the planning process as a means of getting students to 'swallow the medicine'. I don't think this idea gets implemented at the stage of curriculum planning and yet it should be.

Theoretic Cultural Toolkit

Theoretic tools are the last toolkit discussed in detail in book, and they represent an evolution of the kinds of thinking employed in the previous section. A key focus is the sense of abstract reality. For students at this stage, from perhaps 15 years and up, isolated facts and information are no longer sufficent. Learners are looking for general schemas that can help tie their knowledge together into a more comprehensive understanding of the world. They want to answer big questions in search of authority and truth. Students nearing adulthood want to see how they fit into the world and so agency becomes and important tool for educators.

These cognitive tools function as a means of organizing and contextualizing all of the knowledge that students have learned: “Well it is a kind of tool that gives students great power and control over the stuff they think with: it enhances thinking ability enormously, enabling them to put the diversity of of what they have learned into a new kind of order. It also generates flexibility, encourages them to seek out patterns, look for essences, and, most typically, construct theories.”

When choosing overarching meta-narratives and general schemas to best model their world, students are likely to encounter competing narratives. They are likely to be tempted to oversimplify messy reality with totalizing ideologies. Egan is not blind to this possibility: “The aim of the educational process is recognition that meta-narratives are always inadequate, always hopelessly less rich and complex than the reality they try to represent.” One key tool presented is introducing anomalies, essentially poking holes in theories to highlight their shortcomings. Theoretic tools lend themselves to vigorous debate.

It seems difficult to get secondary students to engage with material so deeply that they can evaluate its truth value. Many students are focused on grades and college and not particularly motivated for these types of discussions. For those that are passionate and engaged, it may be difficult to face fervent arguments against one's most strongly-held beliefs. On top of these difficulties, nowadays, many people distrust meta-narratives, especially ones taught in schools.

Then again, where do we want students to first encounter ideological arguments about how they should view life, online? Parents, of course, would like children to learn from (if not parrot) their worldviews, but I do think that learning how evaluate large, abstract ideas could help students when they encounter such principles in the wild as adults.

What can I teach with this? - Lesson content

What kinds of units does this framework help to create? The book provides a number of examples: narratives for teaching homophones, place value in mathematics, or the life cycle of a butterfly. There are example frameworks that focus on the heroic qualities of the industrial revolution, Pythagorean geometry, or the biology of trees.

Could you use these frameworks for everything? Even I, an admitted Egan fan, don't think so.³ Some of the given examples, like the lesson on homophones, are very idiosyncratic and not easily systematized or plugged into a larger curriculum. Some topics wouldn't work well within Egan's paradigm. In particular, subjects that rely more on repeating skills seem less suited to Imaginative Education's strengths.

For those topics that are too difficult to humanize and contextualize using the cognitive techniques in the books, I think Egan would have a question: Should we be teaching these topics? In many cases the answer is definitely yes. There are ideas that are important enough to compel students to learn them through abstracted, disembodied means, but this is not the natural way that people tend to learn. Though some topics are worth soldiering through (basic maths or letter-sound correspondences, perhaps) there are a number of topics that are less vital. 

For Egan, "All knowledge is human knowledge." Knowledge exists in our brains and for our benefit. Disembodied knowledge is only a starting point: “Knowledge is preserved in dead codes- desiccated symbols in books-and the teacher's daily job is to raise the dead, to bring the codes back to life in new minds.”

Does Imaginative Education Work?

In short, I'm not really sure. There are a number of criticisms that tend to come up regarding Imaginative Education, a number of them mentioned and anticipated by Egan himself. I think there is enough here that it merits a full post but I will address some of the ideas here.

A friend of mine read a different book review about Egan's work and responded that he didn't see much that wasn't intuitive to him already.⁴ He summarized Egan's ideas as formulating lessons for relevance and learner interest, plus a bit of scaffolding. To my friend, an experienced teacher, the Egan's suggestions seemed obvious. I agree that some Egan's ideas seem obvious, but I think there are a bit more to them: Egan provides tools and a method as well.

One issue with the method is that it is free-form and requires a flash of insight on the part of the teacher, an ability to identify the wonder and central points of interest for any given topic. Perhaps ironically, Imaginative Education calls for imagination. I think that good educators have this ability but I'm not certain if it is teachable. I do think better knowledge of the subject matter and target audience makes it easier.

The most significant criticism of Imaginative Education and Egan's work more generally is that there aren't a lot of studies that provide conclusive evidence that it works. That should be considered a major red flag. I will posit one caveat: motivation and interest are notoriously hard to measure. We can find evidence that people are interested, might observe quantifiable aspects of engagement, but we can't see into the mind. Even given this difficulty, further study and a bit of skepticism seems warranted.

Throughout the book Egan asks whether there is a better way to do teaching, a way that might make students love learning. Although I can't say for sure whether this approach is effective, it certainly seems worth trying to find out.

1. Yes, I'm aware that there are varying definitions and methodologies for reflection, and that one could delve into the nuances of reflective teaching. This question wasn't asking that.

2. Egan argues that heroic qualities are more important than specific role models: “That is, there’s no need to be constantly dragging heroic figures into the classroom to draw on the instructional value of this cognitive tool. Instead, be alert to the fact that great human qualities can be found in anything, as I argued earlier; in the tenacity of that weed on a rock face, the persistence of stones, the serenity of cats, the productive industry of worms, the rage of storms.”

3. To be fair, Egan himself warned that his ideas were not sacrosanct: “The formulas and frameworks I have presented are, as I have emphasized throughout, not there to be slavishly followed. Rather they are designed as simple reminders of the principles of imaginative engagement that they try to embody.”

4. Brandon Hendrickson's review is an inspiration - well worth a read. Also, Hendrickson has a blog all all about Egan's ideas for education at Lost Tools of Learning.