Richardson, G. E. (1982). Educational imagery: Strategies to personalize classroom instruction. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 194 pp., $24.75
✍ Scribed by William E. Roweton
- Book ID
- 101360437
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1985
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 76 KB
- Volume
- 22
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0033-3085
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Richardson takes a decidedly empathetic but psychologically unsophisticated look
Educational imagery is a classroom method that allows the students to isolate themselves mentally and to use their natural abilities to daydream or fantasize in ways that accomplish educational objectives. (p.4) Children are avid and wonderfully creative daydreamers. Activating every sense, they fabricate new worlds from old routine ones, mixing fact with fancy in gay abandon. Alone and far from home in an unsupervised world of "foreign" realities, children escape, like Walter Mitty, into a world of adventure. Of course, given the American schools for what they are, both students (exercising imagery) and teachers (designing exercises) must be overtly encouraged to keep the creative juices flowing.
So, Richardson reasons, since children daydream naturally, why not instructionally incorporate this impulse: It is more hardware in the teacher's toolbox. Richardson provides dozens of educational-imagery exercises clustered about four course instructional goals: cognitive, affective, behavioral change, and decision-making (providing information, clarifying values, looking at alternatives, etc.). Whatever the course objectives, Richardson convinces me that educational imagery, if artfully applied, may be an effectively motivating curriculum technique.
Richardson's approach has an intuitively logical charm, but, looking at the evidence more objectively, his case is not supported either theoretically or empirically. Richardson makes no effort to uncover the scholastic heritage of mental imagery in modern psychology; I am not convinced, however, that history can be ignored here.
Mental images have a long and illustrious history in human psychology from psychophysics in the last century, to Freud's primary process thinking, to more contemporary emergences, for example, in problem solving (i.e., the incubation phase), Bruner's ikonic mode of learning, and Piaget. Learning from "watching" mental images sounds very much akin to observational learning and social modeling. Unfortunately, other than a little student-reaction data tucked away in the last chapter, Richardson offers nothing that could pass as traditional support. No history. No research.
Indeed, Richardson dismisses the support question and moves directly to application. For him, educational imagery is an obviously valuable teaching strategy, with or without empirical substantiation, and he delivers a basketful of exemplary exercises to promote his inclination.
As a resource, Education Imagery has its place on the teacher's bookshelf. As a psychological treatise, this book needs to be combined with research literature before educational imagery can be considered empirically and pedagogically defensible.