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Inspired by papers developed for the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education: Imaginative Practice, Imaginative Inquiry (Canberra, Australia, 2008), this book connects a cross-section of educators, researchers and administrators in a dialogue and exploration of imaginative and creative ways of teaching, learning and conducting educational inquiry. Imagination is a concept that spans traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries. The authors in this book acknowledge diverse theoretical and practical allegiances, but they concur that imagination will play an essential role in the building of new foundations for education in the 21st century. From our conception of human development through our ways of educating teachers to the teaching of mathematics, they argue for the centrality of imagination in the realization of human potential, and for its relevance to the most urgent problems confronting our world. Introduced by a wide-ranging literature review and extensively referenced, this volume makes an important contribution to a rapidly expanding field.
This collection of essays from scholars in eleven countries, centres upon the theory and practice of the use of imagination in education. By bringing together studies covering a wide range of subject matter we trust that the reader will have the opportunity to appreciate both the diversity within the field and the significance of the topics discussed. We hope too that readers will find connections to their own areas of study. The 13 essays present distinct yet converging points of view, whether it be a discussion of the imagination as a virtue, the use of imagination as a means to improve aboriginal education in Northern Canada, or the description of a museum in Brazil in which the imagination of the child is central to the project. Separately, each of the papers identifies and explores a distinct aspect of Imaginative Education; together, they begin to define the breadth and richness of the field. These essays have been selected from papers presented over a period of several years to research symposiums in imagination and education held every summer in Vancouver, Canada under the auspices of the Imaginative Education Research Group in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University.
Imagination and creative teaching approaches are increasingly important across all higher education disciplines, not just the arts. Investigating the role of imagination in teaching and learning in non-arts disciplines, this book argues that a lack of clarity about what imagination looks like in higher education impedes teachers in fostering their students’ creativity. Fostering Imagination in Higher Education tells four ethnographic stories from physics, history, finance and pharmaceutical science courses, analytically observing the strategies educators use to encourage their students’ imagination, and detailing how students experience learning when it is focussed on engaging their imagination. The highly original study is framed by Ricoeur’s work on different forms of imagination (reproductive and productive or generative). It links imaginative thinking to cognitive science and philosophy, in particular the work of Clark, Dennett and Polanyi, and to the mediating role of disciplinary concepts and social-cultural practices. The author’s discussion of models, graphs, strategies and artefacts as tools for taking learners’ thinking forward has much to offer understandings of pedagogy in higher education. Students in these case studies learned to create themselves as knowledge producers and professionals. It positioned them to experience actively the constructed nature of the knowledge and processes they were learning to use – and the continuing potential of knowledge to be remade in the future. This is what makes imaginative thinking elemental to the goals of higher education.
Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative ‘process’ model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure. This comprehensive and authoritative book: offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectives shows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level by teachers adopting an action research role complements the spirit and reality of much of the teaching profession today, embracing the fact that there is a degree of intuition and critical judgement in the work of educators presents empirical evidence on teachers’ human values. Curriculum and Imagination provides a rational and logical alternative for all educators who plan curriculum but do not wish to be held captive by a mechanistic ‘ends-means’ notion of educational planning. Anyone studying or teaching curriculum studies, or involved in education or educational planning, will find this important new book fascinating reading.
I have long admired the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies. That admiration followed from my experience as a high-school teacher of English in a wealthy suburb of New York City at the end of the 1960s. A “dream” job—I taught four classes of 15–20 students during a nine-period day—in a “dream” suburb (where I could afford to reside only by taking a room in a retired teacher’s house), many of these often Ivy-League-bound students had everything but meaningful lives. This middle-class, Midwestern young teacher was flabbergasted. In one sense, my academic life has been devoted to understanding that searing experience. Matters of meaning seemed paramount in the curriculum field to which Paul Klohr introduced me at Ohio State. Klohr assigned me the work of curriculum theorists such as James B. Macdonald. Like Timothy Leonard (who also studied with Klohr at Ohio State) and Peter Willis, Macdonald (1995) understood that school reform was part of a broader cultural and political crisis in which meaning is but one casualty. In the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies, scholars labor to understand this crisis and the conditions for the reconstruction of me- ing in our time, in our schools.
This book is about imaginative approaches to teaching and learning school science. Its central premise is that science learning should reflect the nature of science, and therefore be approached as an imaginative/creative activity. As such, the book can be seen as an original contribution of ideas relating to imagination and creativity in science education. The approaches discussed in the book are storytelling, the experience of wonder, the development of ‘romantic understanding’, and creative science, including science through visual art, poetry and dramatization. However, given the perennial problem of how to engage students (of all ages) in science, the notion of ‘aesthetic experience’, and hence the possibility for students to have more holistic and fulfilling learning experiences through the aforementioned imaginative approaches, is also discussed. Each chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the theoretical background of a specific imaginative approach (e.g., storytelling, ‘wonder-full’ science), reviews the existing empirical evidence regarding its role in the learning process, and points out its implications for pedagogy and instructional practices. Examples from physical science illustrating its implementation in the classroom are also discussed. In distinguishing between ‘participation in a science activity’ and ‘engagement with science ideas per se’, the book emphasizes the central role of imaginative engagement with science content knowledge, and thus the potential of the recommended imaginative approaches to attract students to the world of science.
This book discusses the kind of imaginative thinking which is going on all the time without producing the masterpieces of art and culture. The author brings together the body of educational theory, psychological theory and some general opinions about imagination, to provide an account of everyday imagining for educationalists, psychologists, teachers and parents.
Imagination is the source of creativity and invention. This volume of essays has been collected expressly to bring readers new ideas about imagination and creativity in education that will both stimulate discussion and debate, and also contribute practical ideas for how to infuse daily classrooms with imaginative activities. Researchers and educators around the world have taken up the discussion about the importance of imagination and creativity in education. This global relevance is represented here by writings from authors from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Romania. In the first part of the book, these authors explore and discuss theories of development, imagination, and creativity. In the second part, they extend these theories to broader social issues, including responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, and to new approaches to teaching curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, as well as to the educational environment of the museum. Since the first edition of this book, Imaginative Education (IE) has developed increasingly accessible strategies for teachers to routinely engage imagination in everyday practice. New essays for the second edition include discussions about increasing political consciousness, improving teacher education, and using mathematical evaluation in Part I, and phenomenological approaches to media education in Part II.
"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination in general education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and the social and multicultural context.... The author argues for schools to be restructured as places where students reach out for meanings and where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. She invites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate their own visions through the application of imagination and the arts. Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for all educators, particularly those in teacher education, and for general and academic readers." —Choice "Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essays presented here." —American Journal of Education "Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of the possibilities of human experience and education's role in its realization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures for educational conformity." —Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art, Stanford University "Releasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and cliché littering the field of education today. It breaks through the routine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks the reader into new awareness." —William Ayers, associate professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago