Explores new ways to enliven your classroom by opening 'the mind's eye, ear and heart'.

As Jerome S. Allender began to study how elementary school children can use mental imagery to facilitate learning arithmetic, spelling, and vocabulary, it became apparent that imagery techniques were also highly effective tools in the adult learning process, the improvement of teaching skills, and the enhancement of the human learning experience in general. These findings, accompanied by supporting data and then given practical application, form the core of this volume, explaining how imagery activities access learning potential. Four unique world views form the framework for the study as each examination of mental imagery procedures is guided by quantitative research, action research, qualitative research, or humanistic research principles. This comparative approach broadens the scope of the work to include not only relevance in the classroom, but also exploration of the role imagery plays in the interaction of fantasy and reality. Researchers will be intrigued by the scientific methodology Allender employs in his study, and teachers will appreciate the practical applications as he investigates a topic whose implications are as limitless as the imagination itself.

The current book presents select proceedings from the Eleventh Annual Conference of AASMI (The American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery) in Washington, DC, 1989, and from the Twelfth Annual Conference of AASMI in Lowell and Boston, MA, 1990. This presentation of keynote addresses, research papers, and clinical workshops reflects a broad range of theoretical positions and a diverse repertoire of methodological approaches. Within this breadth and diversity, however, four aspects of the nature of imagery stand out: its mental nature, its private nature, its conscious nature, and its symbolic nature. The mental nature of imagery--i.e., its epistemological aspect--is explored in the book's first section of articles by Marcia Johnson, Laura Snodgrass, Leonard Giambra and Alicia Grodsky, Vija Lusebrink, Selina Kassels, Helane Rosenberg and Yakov Epstein, M. Elizabeth D'Zamko and Lynne Schwab, and Laurence Martel. These first eight articles fall, essentially, into various domains of cognitive psychology, including the psychology of art and educational psychology. In the second section, the private nature of imagery is studied by Ernest Hartmann, Nicholas Spanos, Benjamin Wallace, Deirdre Barrett, John Connolly, James Honeycutt, Dominique Gendrin, and James Honeycutt and J. Michael Gotcher. These studies, which fall within the realm of personality and social psychology, bring to light the fact that many very public interpersonal behaviors reflect very private images. Such behaviors range from interpersonal rapport with a hypnotist, to rapport with a forensic jury.