The work of Kieran Egan

Egan’s theory of educational development

In a number of works (for a bibliography see below), stretching from Educational Development (1979) to The Educated Mind (1997), Egan proposed that we view human history as a process of coming to terms with the imaginative possibilities of language. He picked out, in particular, four dramatic cultural transformations: the development of oral language, the rise of literate societies, the establishment of communities of theoretic discourse and, most recently, the emergence of deep epistemic doubt. Each of these cultural discoveries, he argued, provided a new set of “cognitive tools” for engaging the imagination in making sense of the world; from the use of those tools, four distinctively languaged kinds of understanding emerged (in order: Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic) that continue to shape our cultures and our minds today.

According to Egan, this broad cultural-historical scheme is particularly helpful in thinking about child development. In his account, every child in a modern society can, at least in principle, recapitulate this process through the gradual, sequential appropriation of the relevant sets of cognitive tools. This implies a view of learning in which imaginative and emotional engagement are central and individual development is embedded within the meaning-making processes of a given society. In that respect Egan’s views are akin to those of the Russian cultural psychologist Vygotsky, although there are also significant differences between their theories.

Egan’s theory of teaching and curriculum

Egan drew direct implications from his developmental theory for the organization of formal education. He was highly critical of the tacit and sometimes explicit assumptions that shape curriculum and teaching in modern school systems, among them the idea that learning proceeds from the concrete to the abstract, the understanding of curriculum as a collection of facts, concepts and procedures, and the tendency to treat thinking and understanding as separate from imaginations and emotion. In books such as The Educated Mind (1997), Getting It Wrong from the Beginning (2002) and The Future of Education (2008) he sought to replace these limiting assumptions with an inclusive vision of how schools could make wonder, narrative and meaning central to the learning process.

Unusually for a philosopher, Egan devoted considerable time and effort to developing practical guidance for educators, especially classroom teachers. His first significant contribution of this kind was a short book called Teaching as Storytelling, published in 1986 by the Althouse Press, a small Canadian published of books on education. The book sold unexpectedly well and was picked up by the University of Chicago Press and republished in 1989. Egan followed this success with a number of other books for teachers (see bibliography below), although none quite reached the same level of popularity. In 2001 he founded the Imaginative Education Research Group, which organized a series of noteworthy conferences on imagination and education, developed a Master’s program based on Egan’s ideas, produced a variety of print and electronic resources for teachers, and built the community of educators and researchers that formed the basis of CIRCE.

Egan on imaginative education – some sample writings and one talk

While the best way to get to know Egan’s work is through his books (see below), we have included here a few pieces that he made available either on his personal website (http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/) or on the old IERG website.

• Letting our presuppositions think for us (an early piece on the limitations of empirical evidence in education)

• The analytic and the arbitrary in educational research (a later piece making a similar argument in greater depth)

• Getting it wrong from the beginning (a close look at Herbert Spencer’s influence on modern education)

• Fantasy and reality in children’s stories (an exploration of the value of fantasy in children’s development)

• A very short history of imagination (a quick tour of Western theories of the imagination)

• Supplement to “Teaching as Story Telling,” including:
  • “Education and the mental life of young children”
  • “Further examples of lesson/unit plans using the story-form framework”
    
• The cognitive tools of children’s imagination (a summary of some key ideas from The Educated Mind)

• Some cognitive tools of literacy (connections with Vygotsky; co-authored with Natalia Gajdamaschko)

• Have overheads: will travel (a series of lighthearted accounts of his academic travels)

• The novice (selected chapters) (excerpts from an unpublished memoir of his time as a Franciscan novice)

This 2009 lecture, from a series featuring SFU’s Canada Research Chairs, offers a nice summary of some of Egan’s key ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QFDzRkmiUE.

A selected biography of Egan’s works

Egan was a prolific writer. Some of his short essays are included on this site, but the range of his thought and interests is most clearly on display in his books. The following list includes most of them, organized by theme and then chronologically.

A Theory of Educational Development

• 1979 Educational Development. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-502458-3
  This is the earliest book on Egan’s educational theory, where you can see him working out some of the key features of the “kinds of understanding” that feature in subsequent works.
• 1983 Education and Psychology: Plato, Piaget, and Scientific Psychology. Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York ; London. ISBN 0-8077-2717-2
  A sustained critique of the “psychologizing” of educational development
• 1988 Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90003-4
  The book that won the Grawemeyer Award, this exploration of young children’s imaginations develops the theory of what Egan came to call Mythic understanding.
• 1990 Romantic Understanding: The Development of Rationality and Imagination, Ages 8-15. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90050-6
  A sequel to Primary Understanding, this book proposes a new way of looking at the imaginative engagement characteristic of literate cultures during the later childhood years
• 1997 The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19036-6
  The most comprehensive outline of Egan’s theory, this book describes five “kinds of understanding” culminating in Ironic understanding

Books for Teachers

• 1986 Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19031-5
  A concise and inspiring argument for imaginative teaching, this book has had wide influence and been translated into several languages
• 1992 Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19033-1
  A practitioner’s companion to “Romantic Understanding” and a kind of sequel to “Teaching as Storytelling”
• 2005 An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. ISBN 0-7879-7157-X
  A practitioner’s companion to “The Educated Mind,” focused on Mythic and Romantic understanding
• 2006 Teaching Literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, Calif. ISBN 1-4129-2788-9
  A book that applies Egan’s ideas in some detail to a core part of the school curriculum
• 2010 Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation that Can Transform Schooling. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ISBN 978-0-226-19043-3
  Egan’s belief in the value of knowing things is at the heart of this argument for engaging students with an assigned topic for the length of their school career
• 2014 Whole School Projects: Engaging Imaginations Through Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-807-75583-9
  Where “Learning in Depth” emphasizes individual engagement, this book makes a case for whole schools exploring a selected topic for up to three years
• 2015 (with Gillian Judson) Imagination and the Engaged Learner: Cognitive Tools for the Classroom. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-807-75714-7
  A practical introduction to imaginative education with a focus on cognitive tools

Other Works on Education

• 1988 (Ed. with Dan Nadaner) Imagination and Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 0-8077-2878-0
  A wonderful edited collection of essays from notable writers
• 1999 Children’s Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges: Essays on Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 0-8077-3808-5
  A collection of some of Egan’s favourite short pieces
• 2002 Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. Yale University Press, New Haven. ISBN 0-300-09433-7
  A thought-provoking critique of some taken-for-granted ideas in education
• 2008 The Future of Education: Reimaging Our Schools from the Ground Up. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. ISBN 978-0-300-11046-3
  An exploration of how Egan’s ideas might transform public education
• 2013 (Ed. with Annabella Cant and Gillian Judson). Wonder-full education: The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning across the Curriculum. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-82029-5
• Fifteen diverse essays by educators from a variety of countries and fields.