Imagination in the Classroom

A central feature of Egan’s work on Imaginative Education is his interest in its practical realization in classrooms and schools. A substantial proportion of his writing is dedicated to strategies and examples aimed at classroom teachers. That tradition has been continued by the Imaginative Education Research Group and by CIRCE, where we continue to collect resources, stories and self-studies of teachers engaged in imaginative classroom teaching.

For a comprehensive introduction to the practical aspects of Imaginative Education, there is still no real substitute for reading Egan’s writings on the topic. However, teachers of all kinds may find value and inspiration in more specific and focused resources and examples. On this site we have grouped these into the following categories:

• An overview of some important “cognitive tools,” which play a central role in the development of teaching strategies deisgned to engage and develop various kinds of imaginative understanding (for further context on this, see “The work of Kieran Egan” and “Imagination in educational development”).
• An array of “planning frameworks” designed to help teachers integrate various cognitive tools in their lesson and unit plans to exploring a particular curriculum topic.
• A set of resources on the particular curriculum strategy Egan called “Learning in Depth,” which involves students learning about a particular topic over an extended period of time. While not necessarily tied to Imaginative Education as a comprehensive teaching philosophy, Learning in Depth was conceived as a complementary approach to help students develop a full range of “kinds of understanding” in relation to their topic.

Accounts of practical experiences with IE can be found in a section dedicated to “Imaginative Education in action,” which features three kinds of content written by teachers:

• reflections on the power of IE as an approach to classroom teaching;
• short examples of subject specific uses of IE;
• self-studies of action research in the classroom, typically conducted in the context of an Master’s program in Imaginative Education.

We have also included a separate set of pages on Imaginative Ecological Education, which adapts and extends Imaginative Education to the specific purposes and challenges of place- and nature-based education.