Creative academic
  • HOME
  • RESOURCES
  • Magazine
  • BLOG
  • Forums
  • MANIFESTO
  • Sustainability
  • Books
  • Collaborations
  • Creativity in Practice
  • Professional Services
  • JOIN OUR COMMUNITY
  • Team
  • creativityindevelopment
  • creative academic
  • WCIW
  • Creative Ed-ventures
  • Learning to Create
  • Open MIc
  • Creativity at Work
ol

Imagine education that cultivates imagination

5/15/2018

45 Comments

 
Picture
​‘What makes the world go around?’  There are many possible answers to this question but one of the most meaningful is ‘imagination’. All the great thinkers understand this. Another possible answer is ‘collaboration’ – when people come together to share imaginations and do something with them there is an energy, a motivational force that connects efforts and contributions so that the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Both these ideas and forces were brought together in the recent edition of Creative Academic Magazine which I had the great privilege of guest editing. Through it I was able to connect in a productive collaboration thinkers and practitioners in the Creative Academic and Imaginative Education communities to produce an inspiring collection of articles which explore imagination in learning, education and practice.

Picture
Imaginative Education, or IE, is not just an approach to teaching, it’s also a theory of human understanding through which we can, as educators, reshape and develop our practices. Although you might not be familiar with IE, it certainly isn’t “new”. In fact, it’s been articulated in many books and well over a thousand articles. It’s been studied in universities around the world for over thirty years and it’s been driving the work of scholars in the Imaginative Education Research Group since 2001. 

Picture
IE is an educational philosophy and practice that centralises imaginative and emotional engagement in teaching at all levels of education. Imaginative educators think about teaching through different lenses. They are centrally concerned with “cognitive tools” and “kinds of understandings”. Imaginative educators tap into the unique features of their students’ emotional and imaginative lives.
 
Emotion Matters
 
Emotion Imagination Feeling: these words rarely take centre stage in conversations about teaching and learning in higher education.  The odd thing is that I have never met an educator that doesn’t value emotional and imaginative engagement. All educators want students to be engaged. All educators want their students to be imaginative, to experience and demonstrate creative and flexible understanding of knowledge. But we rarely discuss how we achieve it in our practices. It’s a sad fact that there is far more talk of “imagination” in the context of educating our younger learners than in Higher Education. Through this edition of Creative Academic Magazine we want to encourage more discussion about imagination in higher education teaching and learning and share some of the ideas and work we have been doing through IE.
 
Cognitive tools
 
All educators want students to remember what they are learning so that curriculum content has an impact on their lives outside school, college or university. “Cognitive tools” are the means through which we can tie up knowledge with students’ emotions and imaginations and, in this way, make the knowledge memorable1. We all make meaning by employing cognitive tools; when we purposefully use these tools to shape our teaching, imaginative education helps learners to use their knowledge to create meaning that is more memorable.
 
People of all ages frequently and routinely think about the world in ways that evoke their emotions and imaginations. For example, human beings universally enjoy stories or narratives of all kinds. We all enjoy jokes and humor. We all identify and interpret patterns in the world around us and are able to spot new patterns as they emerge in our lives. We can be fascinated by extremes of experience and limits of reality--the stuff in the Guinness Book of World Records or amazing and sometimes dangerous feats recorded on Youtube.

Picture
​We may associate with heroes and may (quietly—or not-so-quietly) idolize people, ideas, or institutions. Words cause images to arise in all of our minds. We all enjoy a good mystery and can be left awestruck by unanswered questions or strange events. In the context of Higher Education particularly, we enjoy abstract ideas and theories that represent them. I could go on and on; our emotional and imaginative lives (including learners) manifest themselves in many varied ways. These different forms of engagement are not insignificant; they are actually ways of thinking that help human beings learn. Dr. Kieran Egan calls these features of our imaginative lives "cognitive tools" they are emotional ways human beings make meaning in the world. The crux of the matter is you can nurture the heart of learning—engaging emotion with your curriculum content—if you know what cognitive tools your students employ and if you can use them in your teaching.
​
You can find out more about what these tools are and how they are used by reading Creative Academic Magazine CAM11A which is free to download from the magazine page.

Gillian Judson

http://ierg.ca/gillianjudson/

45 Comments

Our imaginative conversation

5/15/2018

75 Comments

 
Moderating the #CreativeHE conversation on 'Using and Cultivating Imagination' (May 2018) was a great experience. I feel such respect and admiration for the incredible professionalism, pedagogy, and scholarship of the people in the Creative Academic network who participated. You know you have found “your people”—a professional learning network in which you feel you fit best—when the “crazy” ideas you propose and enact in your practice seem not only acceptable but valuable to these people! This was the kind of week I had—learning that leaves me with new directions in which to expand my imaginative practice, and a confirmation that my imaginative pedagogy is valuable to others as well as myself.
 
Interdisciplinary conversations are a joy to be a part of. The varied role of the imagination in human life and the intentional way it is used by professionals were connective threads in the conversation. Whether a Linguist, Geologist, Scientist, Theatre /Performance/ Visual Art professor, or parent or grandparent, imaginative engagement offers a space for growth, satisfaction, freedom and joy. Thanks to the generosity of participants I now possess a (digital) file stuffed with enticing articles, videos and projects to explore. (Nice image isn’t it? For those of us who lived in the days of real filing cabinets and cardboard files, that metaphor of a bulging file, papers sticking out here and there, totally unruly, will create a powerful image in your mind. Whether intriguing or overwhelming—that stuffed folder is full of possibility.)

Our conversation coincided with World Creativity and Innovation Week and this was one of our contributions to this annual global event. 
The first question we asked in our conversation was about what imagination means to each of us. I wasn’t the only one who found this a novel question—despite devoting most of my professional hours to teaching about the role of imagination, its pedagogical importance, and how to engage it in learning, I hadn’t recently reflected on (and definitely not shared) what it means in my life day to day. I appreciated hearing about the highly practical ways in which imagination contributes to everyone’s lives. I was introduced to the term “pragmatic imagination”—thanks Norman. From DIY projects to care-giving (parents listen up!), the great gift that is the capacity to imagine enables us. I appreciated hearing from participants that they need to feed or fuel or ignite or exercise (choose your metaphor!) their imaginations. The imagination emerged as an active part of life for all people—not just the artists of the world. At the same time, you can read that by feeding the imagination, we come to acknowledge its role more fully. The people we talk to, the movies we watch, podcasts we listen to, the books we read, and the places we experience with “affective alertness”, can feed the imagination. (Lunchtime here in Canada’s Surrey, Guildford!) 
 
The Imagination Challenge we posed was particularly interesting to me. The idea of “getting outside” conventions of schooling is a central part of Imaginative Education—as you will read in this volume. But more than metaphorically, I am interested and currently researching how physically getting outside with imagination-focused practices can support learning of the curriculum for all ages. The Walking Curriculum I recently published focuses on the PreK through Grade 12 level. (Note: Physical movement is not essential to the Walking Curriculum—despite the name. The key dimension is the way we are encouraged to learn from the Places we live/learn in ways that support our understanding of curriculum content. Key, too, is getting outside. People of all levels/kinds of mobility can participate.) So, the responses shared for this challenge allowed me to extend my learning into the context of Higher Education.
 
I think one of the reasons that a Walking Curriculum is being received so well by educators, is that metaphorically, it allows and enables us to do what many of us want to do. And that is “get outside” the norms and routines of school. Another layer: the outdoors—even in urban areas—does inspire. My own work on the Imagination Challenge came from a place of no real idea how to teach a concept outside (the story vs story-form) to feeling like I had come up with something pedagogically valuable. (I have shared the idea with some ex-students—the consensus is overwhelmingly positive that this experiential imaginative task would help teach that concept.) So, there is an appreciation among most educators for the “change of venue” getting outside allows. For that reason alone it is an enjoyable activity!
 
Ideally, though, there are particular learning outcomes in our Higher Education courses that can be learned more powerfully and evocatively through experience, through participation in the world. This is what I am most interested in and, to understand this better, I hope to continue the conversation around outdoor, Place-based practices in Higher Education. I realize that what participants chose to share this week was likely selected because it was not so subject-specific that readers couldn’t follow. So, examples may have been more “general” than, say, what could have been shared in a conversation uniquely among Physicists or Architects.
 
Five take-away’s: First, the imagination contributes to all aspects of life—professional (interdisciplinary!), personal, social. In the realm of education I always return to Vygotsky’s quote (below) because in my work I feel at times like I’m swimming upstream—working to convince fellow educators that the imagination is important for learning in all subject areas and grade levels, not just the arts. Imagination isn’t “just for kids”. Imagination matters. Second, imagination is a capacity we all have and the more we work to develop and engage it, the more it can impact us. Third, taking the time to intentionally engage and develop imagination—this week was a week of much what iff’ing for me—pays off not only for ourselves and what we can do with our imagination, but by contributing to a (social/professional) culture in which imagination is given the credit it is due. Four, we can show those around us that we value imagination by giving our colleagues/students actual and ideational space and time to practice using their imaginations, too. And five, imagination is a source of personal and intellectual freedom that makes this wonder-filled world we live in richer and fuller. There’s a joy in it. Especially when you can learn and grow with “your people”- people who care about and appreciate the things that you care about.
 
Citation
Egan, K. (1992). Imagination In Teaching And Learning: The Middle School Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
75 Comments

    Authors

    Creative Academic Team & Friends

    Picture

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2021
    November 2020
    May 2020
    April 2019
    May 2018
    March 2018
    November 2017
    May 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.