Why imagination?
Einstein famously claimed that “imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” It’s a nice way of putting things, and yet it places knowledge and imagination in a kind of opposition to one another. Imaginative education sees them, rather, as collaborators (which is probably what Einstein had in mind anyway). Imagination reaches beyond the limits of knowledge, but it also stands on whatever knowledge has been accumulated to that point. Merely knowing lots of things can be dull if imagination is lacking, but not knowing things leaves the imagination to wander lost.
Importantly, imagination is also bound up with our emotions. To engage with a topic imaginatively is to feel something about the topic. And because memory is shaped to a considerable extent by feeling, we are more likely to remember knowledge that has an emotional dimension—knowledge that is imaginatively alive for us. This is one of the central features of IE: it aims to develop understandings that are lasting, that are in some sense more deeply meaningful to the learner than a pile of facts and concepts, which is what curriculum often boils down to in the ways it is taught and assessed.
Teaching and learning with imagination can be challenging, because the possibilities are so open. Indeed, the “imaginative person is one with the ability to think of lots of possibilities, usually with some richness of detail.” (Alan R. White. 1990. The Language of Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.) A classroom full of imaginatively engaged students will be a classroom teeming with ideas. But this seems like a better problem to have than a classroom groaning under the tyranny of the single “right” idea.
Teaching as storytelling
One of the most powerful tool for imaginative teaching and learning, particularly in the early years—say, before about age eight—is storytelling. Many teachers who have worked on implementing imaginative education in their classrooms have spoken and written about “the power of story” to engage children and make abstract content meaningful.
There are two main uses of the story in education:
- Telling fictional stories to students. This approach, using stories that carry powerful moral and spiritual meaning, has been a core of most religious educational programs from the beginning of time. It has also been very successfully adapted and developed, and extended, in the Waldorf school movement.
- Using elements of the story form to make lessons in math. or science, or history, or whatever more meaningful and imaginatively engaging. It is this latter use of the story that is more central to IE. That is, IE teachers shape regular lessons and units of study into story shapes, drawing on the communicative and engaging power of story to make the everyday material of the curriculum more lively and stimulating to both teacher and student.
The IE approach generally has little to do with telling stories in the traditional sense. The sense of story central to IE is more that of a newspaper editor who asks her reporter, “What’s the story on that event?” That is, she isn’t asking the reporter to make up a fiction, but rather to shape their knowledge of the event so that it will be engaging to the reader. Similarly, IE is interested in finding and working with the great stories about language and mathematics and science and social studies—stories of discovery and struggle, of beauty and betrayal, of collaboration and conflict.
Kinds of understanding and cognitive tools
While various aspects of IE can be picked up and used without knowledge of the underlying theory, Egan developed an original account of the process of educational development—the ways in which children’s imaginative understanding grows and changes within the social and cultural context in which they find themselves. He saw parallels between this process and certain historical developments in human societies tied to the use of different modes of language—oral language, written language, theoretic language. He proposed that these language modes give rise to associated “kinds of understanding” that are somewhat distinct from one another. Rather than seeing later kinds of understanding as superior to earlier kinds, however, Egan argued that each kind makes a key contribution to our imaginative capacities and should be developed and kept lively to the fullest extent possible.
In Egan’s account, the five kinds of understanding are Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic and Ironic. Each of these develops as the child acquires the use of a corresponding set of “cognitive tools,” which were invented and developed by our ancestors for making sense of the world and acting more effectively within it. Examples include:
- stories that helped people to remember things by making knowledge more engaging;
- metaphors that enabled people to understand one thing by seeing it in terms of another;
- binary oppositions like good/bad that helped people to organize and categorize knowledge.
It might seem strange to refer to these as tools, but the term tries to reflect the fact that these are mental devices that help us think and do things more effectively.
When we look around us, we can see that these cognitive tools, and many others, have become a part of our culture. In fact, it would be very hard to imagine life without basic cognitive tools such as stories or metaphors. The accompanying tableshows the key sets of cognitive tools that are routinely employed in IE, with the Mythic and Romantic sets being the most crucial one for most of the years of formal schooling. Most teachers will intuitively recognize the importance of many of these; however, they may not be familiar with how to routinely use them in the classroom. Consequently, many of the most powerful cognitive tools that students have available for imaginatively and emotionally engaging with knowledge tend to be underused in schools. To help resolve this situation, IE provides a set of frameworks and techniques that show how cognitive tools can be effectively used to make everyday teaching more interesting and meaningful while also developing the kinds of understanding.
Some more resources on Imaginative Education
The following pieces by Egan go into the above elements of his theory in greater detail:
A list of Egan’s books and some other samples of his writing can be found here.
The project Learning in Depth, which developed out of Egan’s ideas on the nature of meaningful knowledge, is described here, along with links to resources for teachers.
See the following pages of this section of the website for resources on Imaginative Education for teachers and teacher educators, researchers and graduate students.
This section offers resources for teachers interested in learning more about Imaginative Education or trying it out in their classrooms. The focus is on some of the most important “cognitive tools” identified in the theory; for more depth and context on these, including the “kinds of understanding” or “operating systems” the tools are part of, see references in the previous sections on Imaginative Education.
Learn MoreSince 2003, the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (home to the Imaginative Education Research Group and its successor CIRCE) has offered Master of Education programs with a focus on Imaginative Education. These programs have always included a significant emphasis on classroom inquiry and action research (AR), requiring students to delve deeply into their practice and to explore what happens when they engage their students’ imaginations in learning.
Learn MoreImaginative ecological education (IEE) aims to nurture students’ personal relationships with the natural and cultural contexts in which they live through frequent engagement of the body, emotion, and imagination in learning. To achieve this, the possibility for emotional and imaginative engagement offered by the cognitive tools approach as outlined in Kieran Egan’s theory of Imaginative Education (IE) is paired with focused attention on engaging the body and context.
Learn MoreAs with other educational approaches, Imaginative Education has been taken up, explored, adapted and further developed in many different contexts, only a few of which have been documented. By putting together a searchable database of books, articles, research reports, theses and other publications, we hope to make it easier for educators, graduate students, university faculty and independent researchers to orient themselves in the field.
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