Page:The Educational Screen - Volume 1.djvu/19

In addition to the foregoing projects, called committee projects and most of them completed, each student is working on an individual project. This constitutes a limited elaboration of some special methods in the field which happens to be the student’s college major—English, history, chemistry, biology, or any other subject.

The present course in visual instruction is drawing to its close. But it will be given again next summer, and, we are confident, to a still bigger class and with much more assurance. Then we shall have what has already been done as momentum. We plan to investigate some specific problems in connection with the comparative values of the various visual aids. The aids to be considered will be:

In connection with these aids we shall consider briefly the soundness of each of the following theses:

1. Chalk and the Blackboard. The blackboard and chalk in the hands of a skilled and resourceful teacher constitute the handiest and most economical visual aid to instruction. They should be utilized to the full extent of their possibilities before any other visual aid is resorted to, for they have the great advantage of animation—the presence of a living personality.

The most effective stimulus in learning is the teacher; and the most stimulating quality in a visual aid is the illusion of living reality. The blackboard sketch has the full effect of the former and a fair approximation to the latter in the gradual evolution of plane linear form.

All this being so, no teacher should be considered adequately trained who can not adeptly visualize with chalk the thought relationships he or she is trying to create and establish.

2. Models, Exhibits, Devices. Models should be used whenever it is obvious that they save time and make for clearer notions. The model of a canal lock may save hours of futile explanation and probably years of vague-