Some Suggested Visual Aids for Classroom Use

HE term, "visual aids," is so inclusive that one might safely assume that no professional classroom Bible teacher has ever taught without employing visual aids in one form or other. He walks to the blackboard to write out a strange word or sketch a diagram. He points on a wall map to the relative locations of Galilee, Samaria and Judea. He has the class make maps of Palestine or models of Hebrew scrolls. He holds before the class a large print of one of Michelangelo's prophets. He chooses for supplementary reading a book with illustrations rather than one without. At each of these moments he is making an effort to supplement words, read in the Bible and heard from the teacher, with nonverbal images. To the extent the teacher uses the blackboard, diagrams, maps, models and pictures, to that extent he is using visual aids. The term, projected visual aids, as defined by Rogers and Vieth, includes "all those efforts through which, by means of light and lenses, an image of the object to be presented is thrown on the screen."' This clearly includes (1) reflected pictures, (2) slides of both the older (3x 4) "stereopticon" type and the newer "miniature" (2x2) type, (3) the filmstrip (also variously called filmslide, slidefilm, stripfilm, Picturol and Stillfilm), (4) the silent motion picture (now almost wholly 16 mm. in size) and (5) the type most recently developed for use in the classroom, the sound motion picture. Any of these forms can be used in either black and white or in color. It does not require much consideration by a Bible teacher of imagination and initiative to realize the assistance these devices have the possibility of bringing to the classroom. He knows that the college student of today became familiar with the process of learning by pictur s from his earliest years in kindergarten, through his later extracurricular fascination with the comic books, to his high school days when, in the most progressive schools, the projector was as much a part of the classroom eq ipment as the blackboard and the bulletin board, with its clippings of news pictures and car oons as well as news stories. Beginning in January, 1946, all California colleges training teachers, in order to maintain accreditation, were ordered to require of all teacher graduates a course in audio-visual education of a least two semester units in value.2 Many such illustrations could be given of the extent to which audio-visual aids are being used in the preparatory schools of our country. The projected picture-particularly now with the rapid spread of television into the homes of our nation-has become part of the environment from which our students come to college.3 This only means that projected visual aids have become accepted no longer as novelties and play-things or even as mere media of entertainment but rather as regular channels of communication. The advertiser, the politician and the propagandist know the worth of the projected picture. Industry used visual aids in war-time training programs. A survey of 239 companies representing a wide variety of industries was recently reported. Seventyfive percent of those surveyed reported having used visual aids in more than one type of training. Of those who had used visual aids in war-time training, 84% planned to continue or to increase their use of visual aids.4 The larger universities are developing extensive bureaus of visual instruction both for their own campus classrooms and for their extension services. It is not difficult for the Bible classroom teacher to become aware of the worth