Teacher Resources: Cognitive Tools

As described under “Imagination in educational development,” cognitive tools, in the context of Imaginative Education, refer to culturally embedded strategies for engaging with, organizing and remembering knowledge. In Egan’s theory, particular sets of cognitive tools help to develop particular kinds of (imaginatively, emotionally alive) understanding. We can see these tools in operation all around us, in the stories and images that shape our culture, but many of them are underused in schools. Hence an important aspect of putting IE into practice involves learning to recognize and use cognitive tools to make everyday teaching more interesting and meaningful.

The following table provides overview of the cognitive tools outlined in this section. To learn more, you can either scroll down or click on each one for a fuller explanation and some examples of its use in teaching. We also recommend taking a look at the Tips for Imaginative Educators on Gillian Judson’s website imaginED.

Tools of Oral Language: Mythic Understanding

Abstract Binary Oppositions are the most basic and powerful tools we have for organizing and categorizing knowledge. It is as though we first have to divide things into opposites in order to get an initial grasp on them; so we easily divide the world up into good/bad, high/low, earth/sky, hot/cold, courage/cowardice, and so endlessly on. Think of the classic fairy-tales and consider what lies just below their surfaces. What is Hansel and Gretel about? It reads like a meditation on the opposites of security/fear. And Cinderella?: rich/poor or vanity/modesty, selfishness/altruism. Jack and the Beanstalk, and the others?: courage/cowardice, danger/safety, wealth/poverty, enterprise/timidity, cleverness/stupidity, familiar/strange, and so on. It is as though young children begin to develop these powerful binary categories as soon as they learn language.

And it isn’t only children, of course. Apply this kind of analysis to your favorite TV show. Slugging it out just below the surface are these oldest and most fundamental abstract sense-making cognitive tools. What else underlies the classic Western or Cops & Robbers or sci-fi stories? We see these kinds of oppositions in conflict in nearly all stories, and they are crucial in providing an initial ordering to many complex forms of knowledge. The most powerfully engaging opposites—like good/bad, security/fear, competition/cooperation—are emotionally charged and, when attached to content, imaginatively engaging.

“Affective images” are not pictures or illustrations—they are images in the mind that you can call up simply by talking. They are “affective” in the sense that they have some emotional quality attached to them. Not swooning passions, but just something that engages students’ emotions even if just in a casual way. We tend to be alert to the concepts and content that we teach, and tend to neglect the powerful images that are a part of every topic in the curriculum. This is regrettable because images can be very powerful communicators of meaning, and to neglect them is to ignore one of the great tools in the teacher’s professional toolkit. Indeed, generation of mental images from words can be of immense emotional importance, influencing us throughout our lives. (Think of any event or issue of real importance in your life, and you will find yourself bringing images to mind.) In societies saturated by visual images, as is ours, it is perhaps increasingly important to allow students space to learn to generate their own mental images. We can easily forget the potency of our unique images generated from words. Often the image can carry more imaginative and memorable force than can the concept, and the use of images should play a large role in teaching.

Think about the topic you are teaching—pull back, as it were, from the way you have organized the content and the methods you are using, and look for something about the topic that touches you, or about which you feel some emotional tug. You might find this rather exotic advice—it’s a very rare teacher education program or professional day activity that invites you to feel something about the topics you teach. Yet everything in the curriculum is a product of someone’s hopes, fears, and passions, and part of the trick of engaging children with the knowledge past people have left behind them is to connect with the hopes, fears, and passions that are involved with each topic.

Joking and humor can expose some of the basic ways in which language works and, at the same time, allow students to play with elements of knowledge, so discovering some of learning’s rewards. These cognitive tools can also assist the struggle against arteriosclerosis of the imagination–helping in the fight against rigid conventional uses of rules and showing students rich dimensions of knowledge and encouraging flexibility of mind.

In the imaginative classroom we will expect to see much more humor than is currently common. Students will be encouraged to generate good jokes about what they are learning. A few math jokes…Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9. (7 ate 9. O.K., you got it first time.) What goes 99 thump, 99 thump, 99 thump… A centipede with a wooden leg. Why are two times 10 the same as two times 11? Because two times ten equals 20, and two times 11 equals twenty, too. (Twenty-two)

A metaphor is the tool that enables us to see one thing in terms of another. Or, to put it another way, metaphor involves representation of one thing as though it were something else. “I felt like I was walking on air;” “Feeling down in the dumps?” “He pulled himself up by his bootstraps;” “The markets went south;” etc. We constantly make this peculiar kind of substitution in order to give force and energy and richer meaning than can be managed by a simple literal phrase or sentence. This peculiar ability lies at the heart of human intellectual inventiveness, creativity, and imagination. We do not all use metaphor equally well, but we all have access to it, and the use of appropriate metaphors can stimulate the imagination and creativity in all subject areas. It is important to help students keep this ability vividly alive by exercising it frequently; using it routinely in teaching will help students learn to read with energy and flexibility.

In the imaginative classroom, then, teachers will not only use metaphors constantly––which we can hardly avoid doing––but will call attention to them (as, for example, in the above case of “influence”), discuss them, encourage students to recognize their own and reflect on how they work. Just one or two daily––or even less frequently, as long as it becomes a consistent exercise––bringing metaphors to conscious attention and analysis.

Narratizing refers to casual and quick use of a related tool—the story form. When one narratizes one finds something within the content that lends itself to brief vivifying by means of an anecdote or a personal detail. And that brings us to the other item discussed in this set. Personalizing is simply the way in which we can convert events or content that is normally removed from any personal traits into something immediately more engaging by putting it into a human context or imbuing it with human characteristics.

Use of this tool colours our representation of events with appropriately recognized emotion, organizing events by identifying acceptable causal sequences, integrating motives into the causal sequences, interpreting intentions in diverse personalities, and so on. These are, needless to say, enormously sophisticated cognitive capacities, but ones all children will have in greater or lesser degree. In teaching students who will have the tools of orality in place, then, we will want to reflect on how we might build on those capacities and develop them further in turn.

In the imaginative classroom we will expect to see much readier use of narratizing and personalizing of content than is common at present, at least in the classrooms we have seen. All teachers know that if they pause and tell the students about some weird event or accident that they saw on the way to school, attention is immediately enhanced; if the event is well told, one can feel the intensity of interests among the students. The trick is to think about whatever topic one is teaching, and introduce items of interest to students that will enhance understanding and engage students’ imaginations. The lives of mathematicians, scientists, explorers, and writers are chock-full of incidents that are not the usual focus of teaching, but which can enlighten and enliven a great deal of the world students are learning about.

We are more familiar with puzzles, and how they can engage students’ imaginations if we choose well. What state in the U.S.A. is named after Julius Caesar? This is a good puzzle, in that it has an answer, and it pulls together two well known areas of knowledge that nevertheless seem quite alien. The answer is New Jersey, because the word “Jersey” was transformed through centuries from the name of some islands that used to be called Caesar’s Islands, or Insulae Caesareae. Caesareae gradually changed over the centuries and the Jersey Islands are thus, really, Caesar’s Islands, and New Jersey is properly New Caesar.

The sense of mystery is less commonly used in teaching, but is perhaps even more powerfully engaging if used well. It is an important tool in developing an engagement with knowledge that is beyond students’ everyday environment. It creates an attractive sense of how much that is fascinating remains to be discovered. All the subjects of the curriculum have mysteries attached to them, and part of our job in making curriculum content known to students is to give them an image of richer and deeper understanding that is there to draw their minds into the adventure of learning.

In the imaginative classroom we will expect to see much greater emphasis on puzzles and mysteries. These can indeed involve the more sensational kinds trumpeted by popular papers, but should also move constantly in the direction of the deeper puzzles and mysteries beyond our range of knowledge. Even when learning simple counting, the idea of infinity can be brought forward for even young children to butt their heads against. (One of our children became quite puzzled early in his school career when he was told he wouldn’t be able to learn to count to the end.) When learning about prime numbers, students can be invited to find some pattern in the appearance of primes, and then can be told that this is one of the most persistent puzzles mathematicians have grappled unsuccessfully with for centuries. These different ways of seeing the familiar constantly open up puzzles and mysteries surrounding our small and insecure space of knowledge.

Rhyme, rhythm, and pattern are potent tools for giving meaningful, memorable, and attractive shape to any content. Their roles in learning are numerous, and their power to engage the imagination in learning the rhythms and patterns of language—and the underlying emotions that they reflect—is enormous. They are important in learning all symbol systems, like mathematics and music, and all the forms of knowledge and experience that we code into symbols.

The story form is one of the most powerful tools students have available for imaginatively engaging with knowledge. Stories are instruments for orienting our emotions to their contents.  That is, stories do not just convey information about events and characters, nor do stories just convey information in a way that engages our emotions; stories orient, or shape, our emotions to the events and characters in a particular way; they tell us how to feel about their contents.  No other form of language can do this, and so no other form of language can achieve the range and kinds of effects that stories can.  The story is like a musical score and our emotions are the instrument it is designed to play.

The value of the story to teaching is precisely its power to engage the students’ emotions and also, connectedly, their imaginations in the material of the curriculum. There are two senses of the story. The commonest is that fictional form, made up of invented characters, which teller and hearer understand is not literally true. The second sense is perhaps easily understood in terms of the newspaper editor who asks a reporter, “What’s the story on this?” The reporter’s task is to select and organize the material in order to bring out the emotional and imaginative meaning of the topic, to shape the events to bring out their emotional force. This is the sense in which teachers can use stories routinely in teaching any content, without fictionalizing it in any way.

Tools of Written Language: Romantic Understanding

Association with the heroic is the tool that enables us to overcome some of the threats involved in the new sense of reality. Remember what it was like when you were ten or eleven years old. You were at the mercy of bus schedules, teachers’ requirements and school regulations, parents’ commands, dress codes, and so on and on—in fact, while your own ego and sense of independence were beginning to develop, you seemed hemmed in by the endless laws, rules, and regulations of others.  By associating with those things or people that have heroic qualities we can gain confidence that we too can face and deal with the real world, taking on those qualities with which we associate.

One trouble with the sense of reality is that, initially at least, the student has little sense of just what the world’s limits are or how the world works. This can be, and usually is, disturbing, perhaps a little frightening. Many of us forget the insecurity of discovering an autonomous reality beyond our knowing and control. But the mind has strategies for dealing with this potential source of insecurity. Perhaps the commonest strategy employed to meet this threat is to make a mental association with someone or something that seems able to overcome the threats posed by everyday reality—anything from a sports team or star to a political leader or a popular icon like Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr., or a local institution such as a school or company. The power of forming such associations is so versatile that the range of objects seems limitless: the tenacity of a weed on a stormy rock face, the ingenuity that has created an insulated plastic cup, the beauty and power of an animal, the elegance of a mathematical proof.

Changing the context is a tool that enables the imagination to grasp the richer meaning of any topic. The classroom is often an emotionally sterile place; so routine that one topic after a while begins to look like another. By shifting the context in which knowledge is learned—by use of often simple devices—students’ imaginations can be brought vividly to life, engaging the material much more richly.

What has all this to do with teaching? Well, one problem with the classroom is its largely unvarying context, which students gradually come to take for granted. Remembering Marshall McLuhan’s slightly mischievous claim that “the medium is the message,” we can see how the unvarying nature of the classroom can make much of what students experience in classrooms take on a uniform and somewhat boring cloak (1964). At least, this is what most of the large-scale surveys of students’ experience of school tell us. One way we can plan a challenge to the imagination-suppressing taken-for-grantedness of the daily classroom is to change the context now and then. Traditional ways of changing contexts have involved such activities as field trips. While this is, of course a useful way to change the focus of students’ attention, we are interested in a somewhat different kind of context changing, a kind that is concerned more with the intellectual activity required of the student and that doesn’t take hugely elaborate preparation by the teacher.  Can students take on different roles?  Can events or ideas be reenacted?  Can ideas be debated?  Can experiments be conducted?  Can the classroom be made to “feel” different through visual, auditory, olfactory or other means?

Collecting and hobbies provide another route for students to gain some security within the real world they are learning about, but whose limits and dimensions they remain uncertain of. Gaining intellectual mastery of something gives assurance that the worlds is not limitless and can be mastered, in some significant degree. The normal profile for hobbies and collections is that they begin about the time literacy becomes fluent, reach a peak of intensity around age 11 or 12, and die out around 15.

The extremes of experience and limits of reality become of central concern to students’ imaginations after they become fluently literate. This fascination with extremes, with the exotic and strange features of reality, is a means by which students’ imaginations explore the extent of the real world in which they find themselves. In part, this common fascination we see in newly literate students with, say, the subject matter of The Guinness Book of World Records (Who was the biggest, or smallest, or hairiest person? Who had the longest fingernails? Who has pulled the heaviest weight with their teeth, and so on?) is a search for a kind of intellectual security about their own life and circumstances. They are not fascinated by who had the longest fingernails for that person’s sake but because it tells them something about proper scale and about norms, by limiting the possible. That is, in a roundabout way they are seeking knowledge about themselves. So when we suggest that teaching will be more effective by occasionally engaging students with the limits of the real world and human experience, we don’t mean that to suggest removing any focus on their everyday world. Their new knowledge should empower them to deal better with precisely that. The everyday world around them can become more meaningful, and meaningful in a new way, if they orient to it through attention to the limits or context within which it exists.

Humanization of meaning is the tool that enables us to see beyond the surface of any knowledge to its source in human life. Knowledge is part of living human tissue; books and libraries contain only dead codes. The business of education is enabling new minds to bring to new life old knowledge. All knowledge is human knowledge, and the imagination is enlivened by understanding the human emotional core of the knowledge the student is learning.

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. When students learn a mathematical algorithm, for example, by seeing who invented it and for what purpose or how it is used for some dramatic purpose today, they absorb it more easily, understand it better, and remember it.

A narrative structure or, what can also be called the story-form, organizes facts, ideas, concepts, etc. in a coherent and emotionally engaging way.  In discussion of the tools of oral language and the imaginative dimensions of Mythic understanding, we identify the story as crucial in early learning; it is the tool that enables us to bring curriculum content and emotion together to make knowledge more fully meaningful to the student. That remains largely true for older students, but the kind of story that engages them is different from the basic story structures more common in early years. The term narrative is now used to refer to the story-form shaped by the emotional and imaginative features of literacy.

A narrative is a continuous account of a series of events or facts that shapes them into an emotionally satisfactory whole. It has in common with a story that shaping of emotion, and so the words are often used synonymously, but it is different in that narratives can be less precisely tied into a tight story, less concerned with emotion, more varied, more open, more complex. That is, the term narrative is used to indicate the greater variety and openness of the stories that prove most useful as students become fluently literate.  Like story, narrative preserves the importance of shaping events and facts to affect emotions.

Revolt and idealism are related tools during adolescence. Students both resist the adult world and shift to find a place within it, and they desire to see it as better than it is. Revolt implies an ideal, whose absence justifies the revolt.

In this dynamic we can see an important cognitive tool: the ability to imagine a world or particular circumstances that are superior in some way to the reality the students experience, to recognize those features of the adult world that prevent their ideal’s being realized, and to revolt against them. And how can we use this cognitive tool in everyday teaching? Well, in nearly every topic we teach, math no less than in history, there will be examples of conventions or obstructions that prevent the achievement of some ideal, and there will also be someone or some idea prevailing against the conventions or obstructions.

The literate eye refers to opportunities involved in increasingly flexible literacy for the eye to play a larger role in organizing knowledge; in the making and manipulation of lists, flowcharts, diagrams, and other literate tools.

When literacy comes increasingly to influence students’ thinking, the eye is becoming crucial in accessing information. This has many consequences, which are subject to some dispute among scholars interested in the effects of literacy. But, whatever the outcome of those arguments, it is clear that literacy leads to some techniques for organizing information that are both important and engaging for students to learn. Making and manipulating lists, flowcharts, and diagrams become value learning activities. In many subject areas, such techniques can enlarge students’ engagement in gaining control over areas of complex knowledge. Use of such tools also exercises and develops them in students. Today many of these tools are built into computer programs, and certainly learning to use databases and other programs that aid organization and retrieval of knowledge can enhance this cognitive tool in students.

The sense of agency is a tool that enables us to recognize ourselves as related to the world via complex causal chains and networks.  We become more realistic in understanding how we can play roles in the real world, and understand ourselves as products of historical and social processes.

Theoretical thinking develops in students the ability to see themselves as agents in the vast processes they have come to recognize.  Their very sense of their own identity shifts as they begin to discard or distrust the “romantic” associations that had earlier contributed to their sense of self, and instead they recognize themselves as constructed by these vast historical, social, etc. processes of which they are a part.  They are who they feel themselves to be, not as a product of their association with heroes, but because they have been born at a particular time and place within particular social conditions.

The sense of wonder is a key tool in our initial explorations of reality. It enables us to focus on any aspect of the world around us, or the world within us, and see its particular uniqueness. We can turn this sense of wonder onto anything, recognizing the wonderful in every feature of the world around us. Wonder can be an engine of intellectual inquiry. It is a part of literate rationality’s persistent questioning, a more directed kind of questioning than is common earlier in the young child’s incessant “why?” Wonder can be silent in front of nature’s grandeur, but it mostly encourages us to ask questions. “I wonder . . .” is the start of scientific thinking. I wonder why the bathwater rises as I sink into it? I wonder how many worms there are in the garden? I wonder why the sky is blue?  The world becomes an object of wonder and inquiry. Stimulating wonder energizes the literate mind.

In the imaginative classroom we will be sensible to attend to ways to evoke a sense of wonder related to the topics at hand. This will require the teacher to reflect on each topic and locate what is wonderful within it. Anything—yes, anything—seen in the right light, can be seen to be wonderful. Even if the lesson involves dealing with the everyday transactions of shopping, the teacher can draw attention to the astonishing variety of goods brought from all the corners of the world, the ingenuity that has gone into arranging food in hygienic containers with stunning efficiency, the work of generations of chemists and physicists that has gone to making such taken-for-granted products as toothpaste, fruit juices, frozen peas, and so on. This does not demand lengthy factual lessons on the background of each item, but rather a constant alertness to the wonder of the shop. It is hard for some people to pull back from utilitarian routines, but the teaching task required to stimulate imagination involves the teacher in constantly locating the immediate objects of the lesson in the wider context of wonder. A part of imaginative teaching is to locate something wonderful in every lesson; doing so will not only make learning easier for the student, it will also make the lesson more interesting and satisfying for the teacher.

Tools of Theoretical Language: Philosophic Understanding

The grasp of general ideas and their anomalies is a tool that enables us to perceive and construct abstract ideas about nature, society, history, and human psychology—and then recognize their inadequacy and rebuild them into more complex ideas. Recognizing the interaction between generalizations, theories, ideologies, schemes, etc. and anomalies can lead quite directly to at least one teaching strategy for students developing “philosophic understanding,”:   the teacher encourages the development of theories, ideologies, etc., and then proposes to the student an anomaly kicking the process into action.  The teacher’s role is not to try immediately to undermine the student’s theory or ideology but rather to bring it to greater and greater sophistication, until it eventually crumbles under the load of anomalies, letting the student see the limitation of such generalized schemes but also recognize their utility and the circumstances in which they are genuinely powerful aids to effective thinking.

Meta-narrative understanding is a tool that orders facts or events into general ideas and allows us to form emotional associations with them.  That is, we don’t just organize facts into theories, we shape even our theories into more general meta-narratives that further shape our emotional commitments.

As stories help us to organize facts and events into emotionally meaningful patterns, so meta-narratives help us to organize generalizations, theories, metaphysical schemes, ideologies and other abstract conceptions into emotionally meaningful patterns. What binds theories together is a meta-narrative.  It is a very general, and very powerful, tool which prominently uses our emotions to create coherent responses to varied phenomena.  Meta-narratives are clearly tied to complex higher psychological processes and their purpose is to create for us emotional satisfaction with regard to the complex inhabitants of our abstract realm.  Like all of our tools, we may misuse it or not develop it very adequately.  But is proper use allows us great facility in bringing together in emotional harmony an array of abstractions.

The search for authority and truth is a tool that helps assess the worth of general ideas, testing their validity so that meaning can be derived from them.  This takes on a particular shape and importance with the development of abstract theoretic thinking, which seeks an objective, certain, privileged view of reality.  Among the historical products of this cognitive tool at work have been dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks—repositories of secured knowledge.

A sense of abstract reality is a tool that enables us to make sense of the world in terms of ideas. The developing mind begins to construct an abstract world of general concepts that represent reality in a new way. It permits understanding of the processes by which nature and society work and of our increasing control over these processes. It takes shape as part of the development of disembedded, rational, logically structured forms of thinking. Visiting our hilltop Italian town as a Philosophic thinker, one doesn’t seek the landmarks as one might with Romantic understanding, one refers to a map.

This new abstract theoretic world can come to appear more real and reliable than the everyday particular world from which it is abstracted. Our senses and our feelings can deceive us, as becomes evident when we look at the astonishingly divergent accounts witnesses commonly give of the same event. Our theoretic world can thus seem to be more “objective.” (We might feel that the castle is further north and not so far, but what we feel is irrelevant compared to where the reliable map says it is. The photograph’s evidence that you wore a blue dress is irrefutable by your memory of having worn a Spiderman outfit.) The transition to this new kind of thinking can be very exciting for students who access it quickly and thoroughly. They believe that they are at last able to understand how things really are and how the world works. The world thus becomes re-seen as made up of vast processes – historical, social, psychological, anthropological – governed by laws and rules which abstract theoretic thinking alone can discover.