Employing Imagination in Accelerated Learning - Part 2

In the previous article, we discussed the philosophy of accelerated learning, its principles, and its use of suggestion and imagination tools to make learning more fun and effective by helping learners immerse themselves in learning. Also, we presented the difference between mental wandering and imagination, as well as the link between learning, memory, and imagination. In this article, we will complete our discussion and learn about the product of interaction between imagination and knowledge, the benefits of imagination in learning, and the imaginative learning approach and its tools.

Knowledge and imagination: 

Knowledge revolves around facts and information, and learning revolves around giving meaning to knowledge, while imagination supports knowledge through the process of forming new ideas or new concepts for everything that is beyond the limits of the senses, and thus contributes to the practical understanding of knowledge, and includes the skills that we acquire through experience or expertise.

That is, imagination grows the more our knowledge grows, pushes us to search for new knowledge, and keeps us in the cycle of discovery and learning. This discovery requires risk from both the teacher and the learner, as the learner puts their fears aside and expresses their opinions and ideas instead of re-submitting the correct answers to the questions posed by the teacher in traditional learning. In contrast, the teacher takes the risk of asking questions that take the learners to the space of creativity that the learners have not yet discovered, putting their opinions and judgments aside, and being open to the real learning moment experienced by the learners and their ways of seeing problems and coming up with solutions.

"Imagination is one of the foundations of success" is a rule and necessity in the accelerated learning curriculum, which calls for reviving the instinct of learning. Imagination is inseparable from the knowledge we receive through the senses, nor from the experience that produces learning. However, the traditional education path designed to keep pace with the industrial age deviates us away from learning instinct by focusing on presenting information, reproducing the information, evaluating the correct answers by the grading system, and deliberately marginalizing the role of imagination in creativity and providing solutions to the current problems of society and imagining the future. Hence, traditional education is unable today to provide learners who are able to keep pace with the rapid growth in many areas necessary to build the future.

The benefits of using imagination in learning: 

The practice of imagination in learning contributes to:

• Transforming knowledge into learning
• Consolidating concepts appropriately and keeping them in memory for a longer period.
• Access to focused attention and then improve brain function.
• Eliminating distractions (visual/tactile/smells, etc.), and focusing the learners' mental resources on the task at hand.
• Reducing stress arising from dealing with difficult tasks or during exams.
• Preservation of memory and neurons located in the hippocampus.^[1]
• Dopamine^[2] release as a reward for the learner, which gives them a sense of happiness to accomplish the task in their hands.
• Training young learners in activities that involve genuine focus is later linked to a reduced risk of dementia.

The approach of imagination in learning:

In his book "An Imaginative Approach to Teaching"^[3], Kieran Egan^[4] wrote his ideas related to the employment of imagination in the learning process of students in the classroom "engage learners' imaginations in learning and teachers in teaching through the use of a set of principles and techniques that make teaching more effective and knowledge in the curriculum vivid and meaningful." 

The goal of the teacher in this curriculum is to present their subject in a way that engages the emotions and imagination of the learners, while the imaginative learning approach employs the cognitive tools - which children develop during their growth and interaction with society - in teaching learners in a way that generates distinct types of understanding of the external and internal world and their personal experiences and helps them to engage in them.

He believes that these tools expand and change the senses, and thus expand their understanding of themselves in more complex ways. This is done by integrating its tools, such as language, reading, writing, and abstract-theoretical thinking during their interaction within the educational process.

His approach^[5] classifies the cognitive tools into groups according to the type of understanding generated by each group, which are:

1. The body’s toolkit:

Meaning making and learning tools in the imaginative approach, which are:

1.1. Senses:

They are hearing, sight, touching, smelling, and tasting, which are stimulated in the early years of childhood, helping the child to form their initial understanding of the external world, and to realize a certain scope and size of the phenomena of the external environment and deal with them.

1.2. Emotions:

The primary tool for making meaning, and they develop to direct and regulate a child's perception of the world because the way we respond to external stimuli in the environment depends on our feelings; That is, the way we critically interpret events will always depend on our feelings, which are a group of responses formed according to our view of events. Here, cognitive perception cannot be separated from the feelings that drive the behavioral response of the learners.

1.3. Pattern and Musicality:

We are beings with pattern and rhythm at the center of our bodies. Egan bases his conviction on the opinion of Steven Mithen^[6] in his book "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body"^[7] in which he proposes that we, as humans, evolved in search of meaning through the patterns that our senses feed us.

1.4. Humor:

It is based on dissonance, and it reflects our ability, as human beings, to deal easily and with pleasure with contradiction in experience in a way that contributes to enriching it and the flexibility of our brains, which is crucial and vital in learning and for the learner who indulges joyfully in learning in a way that contributes to highlighting their flexible, imaginative, and creative thinking.

2. The toolkit of language:

It comes with oral language and helps learners learn the content of the curriculum and engage their imagination in learning scientific curricula, such as mathematics and science, as well as humanities, such as poetry and drama, including:

2.1. Story:

A narration of events that proves our emotional orientation to the elements that make it up. We attribute the emotional meaning to events, people, and our lives through their synergy with our personal experiences. The story is the most important social invention that contributed to directing the listeners’ feelings towards its contents and helped them understand their personal experience and lead their emotions through the sequence of events involved in the story, Egan asserts: "We are beings who understand an important dimension of our experience and our world in the forms of the story."

2.2. Binary opposites:

A form of development in the formation and making of meaning in humans before the development of language. Fairytales were built mainly on top of contradictions in a strong, extreme, and abstract way, such as safety and anxiety, pleasure and pain, expectation and satisfaction, happiness, and sadness. The child learns to mediate between these opposites and organize their internal world by classifying things into opposites.

2.3. Joke:

It relies heavily on dissonance, and it comes through recognizing the different meanings of the same words in special contexts. For example, it is mean to hit children, but the chef is not considered mean when they hit eggs. The joke is a linguistic development in understanding metacognition, which is crucial in Egan's view to developing a flexible and creative use of language.

2.4. Images:

The ability to recall accurate and rich images is a unique feature of our brains, and it is clearly linked to the development of imagination. The available images to our minds are limited in our early years, but the acquisition of language greatly enriches them. Listening to stories helps develop our ability to form images in our minds.

Here, Egan asserts that the teacher, when planning the lesson, should not delve into the important concepts only, but should give at least equal time to the learner to think about the images that are part of these concepts.

3.5. Mystery and puzzles:

An important tool in developing learners' interaction with knowledge that goes beyond their daily environment, creating an attractive sense of the splendor of discovery. If the teacher examines the materials of the curriculum, they will find that it contains puzzles by nature, and their main work is to enrich and deepen the understanding of the learners by attracting their minds to the adventure of uncovering these puzzles and mysteries.

3. The toolkit of literacy:

The tools that children learn once they get involved in formal education. These tools provide their developing brains with a new kind of concept of reality, and they develop with time what is known as the human meaning, which is a tool that enables them to see beyond the surface of any knowledge to reveal its roots in human life. Egan believes that these tools make knowledge memorable and at the same time give it meaning through this context, including:

3.1. The extreme limits of reality:

It enables learners to know reality and its extreme limits, the strange, the unfamiliar, and the wonderful in it. When the teacher begins the topic of the lesson with information outside the learners’ daily experiences, it will pique their curiosity and enthusiasm to discover new limits of reality, which gives them an understanding of the reasonable and acceptable criteria and standards, as it tells them about themselves in another way.

3.2. Linking to tournaments:

Tournaments contribute to opening horizons for learners’ ability to overcome challenges and threats when considering that heroes are human beings with human characteristics who, through their personal characteristics, were able to write their names in history, so what is possible for heroes becomes possible for learners, and they gain confidence in dealing with reality. and its challenges.

3.3. Accumulation of details:

It is the door through which young people enter to study topics or practice useful activities related to reality as a means of transitioning from childhood and its interests to benefiting from the knowledge field that lies behind scientific and human subjects and various hobbies in the adult world.

3.4. Human knowledge:

Egan believes that “the Internet and libraries are full of symbols, not knowledge.” Learners are able to rebuild symbols into knowledge by being able to read and write tools. Knowledge is derived from human hopes, fears, and emotions; Learners have to see it in the context of the human hopes, fears, and emotions that generated it in the first place.

References:

• [1] The hippocampus is a small crease in the brain that lies below each of the temporal lobes. It plays an important role in forming memories. It takes our experiences and interactions, putting them into a mold by forming new connections between neurons.
• [2] It is known as the hormone of happiness, and it is an organic substance that is secreted in the human body and plays the role of a hormone and a neurotransmitter, and it has many effects on the brain in particular, and on the human body in general. It plays a key motivational role in the brain's reward system, as anticipation of rewards increases dopamine levels in the brain.
• [3] An Imaginative Approach to Teaching.
• [4] Kieran Egan is interested in education and focuses his work on introducing new educational theory and examining its implications for the curriculum, teaching practices, and the school. On his site, he provides information about his books and articles for those interested in this theory, as well as links to projects and programs that have been developed from the ideas in the books on his site, including the Imaginative Education Research Group, Deep Learning, the Virtual Literacy Program, the Whole School Project, and others.
• [5] Kieran Egan's page (sfu.ca).
• [6] Steven Mithen.
• [7] The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.