The Phenomenon of Imagination in Contemporary Education. Competence Essential for the Development of Children Supported by the Creative Visualisation Technique

The rapidly changing world forces the necessary changes in education consisting of the development of teaching strategies that prepare the student for unpredictable, non-standard, and fluid situations. The author discusses the problem of supporting competence essential for the development of school-age children and their functioning in such a world. The article may be of interest to early school education teachers, but not only. The strategy of education using imagination, which covers the method of designing educational opportunities, refers in the conducted research to competence triad, i.e. independence-innovativeness-cooperativeness. To support the said competence, the author constructed a technique of creative visualisation and developed an educational programme for two parallel groups based on the method of designing educational opportunities, and in one of the groups, an innovative factor in the form of creative visualisation techniques was implemented. In the research, the qualitative and quantitative style was used implementing participant observation, humanistic interpretation (works of art and statements) and tests for creative thinking (drawing and verbal). The qualitative analysis consisted of description and interpretation concerning the analysed set of competence with the use of their manifestation. The quantitative analysis aimed at answering the question about a significant increase in competence required the use of a method based on the t-Student test. The results of the qualitative and quantitative analyses showed the beneficial impact of creative visualisation in the area of the competence in question.