Pedagogy of the imagination

• Main Author: Frein, Mark
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Imagination
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6773

The imagination is a concept in educational thought that has proven time-tested like few other educational ideas. What attracts so many educators to the imagination continues to be its associations with individuality, creativity, empathy, and social transformation. These associations are the direct legacy of the Romantic revolution in aesthetics, philosophy, and religion. It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate this Romantic legacy from current use of the imagination in educational thought. There is, however, a deep tension in the use of the imagination in education discourse — the imagination, for Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Blake was strongly positioned against pre-Romantic understandings of mind, morality, and poetry. Thinkers seeking to bring the Romantic imagination into theories of schooling have wrestled with these Romantic associations with varying degrees of success. While many educators still believe that imagination is generally a good thing and ought to be a focus of educational effort, the purpose of such effort is no longer as clear as it was for the Romantics. Why should we educate for imagination? How should children "use" their imaginations and for what ends? These are questions that are often addressed in passing in educational discourse or assumed to need no answer at all. What needs to be reconstructed, I believe, is a sense of what is at stake in the education of what we have called the "imagination". === Education, Faculty of === Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of === Graduate