IERG – foundations of imaginative education

From 2001-2015, the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG) was dedicated to showing how learners’ imaginations can be engaged with learning about any topic and in any classroom. The group was founded by Kieran Egan. His vision has inspired thousands of teachers all over the world to reflect upon their daily practices, challenge their tacit assumptions about learning and curriculum, and embark upon the quest to find emotional connections, deep meaning and creative ways of exploring any topic.

Guided by Egan’s groundbreaking work, the IERG sought ways of popularizing and mobilizing theories, principles, and practical techniques for accomplishing these goals, under the general label of Imaginative Education (IE). The following quote from Egan captures one of the key ideas in the IERG’s work:

All the knowledge in the curriculum is a product of someone’s hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. If we want students to learn that knowledge in a manner that will make it meaningful and memorable, then we need to bring it to life for them in the context of those hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. The great agent that will allow us to achieve this routinely in everyday classrooms is the imagination.

The International Conferences on Imagination and Education,  hosted by the IERG in Vancouver from 2003 to 2015, played an important role in these efforts, as did the numerous workshops and Master’s programs developed and delivered by IERG members. A number of externally funded research projects explored the potential of Egan’s ideas to improve outcomes for Aboriginal students, for literacy and science teaching, for environmental and place-based education, and so on. IERG members also produced several MA and PhD theses on issues in imaginative education over this period.

Following Egan’s retirement from university teaching in 2015, the IERG was restructured as the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education (CIRCE). The CIRCE website now hosts a wealth of material on Imaginative Education, and CIRCE faculty, including members of the Academic Council, continue to draw on Egan’s ideas in their teaching and research. The old IERG web pages are still hosted on the CIRCE website.”