robert fitzgerald, phd

The beginning of 2008 will see a noteworthy event held in Australia for the first time. The Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG) at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and IERG associates at the University of Canberra are hosting the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education. The conference aims to stimulate discussion of imaginative education and its applications in all sites of learning, and to ensure that educational experiences are imaginatively engaging for both teachers and learners. The work of the IERG (and others) can be seen as part of a growing swell of interest in imagination and the way in which it influences creative and emotionally engaging education. In the last fifteen years brain research has confirmed the importance of engaging affective domains in learners (e.g. Damasio 2003; LeDoux 1996), showing that to do so increases levels of attention, retention and enjoyment in the act of learning. Research into how our brain works has also shown that emotional engagement is closely related to images and the imagination (see LeDoux 1996). When we imagine, the part of the brain associated with emotions, the amygdala, is activated together with the cortex of the brain (where logical processes mainly take place). In other words, if we engage students’ imagination, we engage their affective domains, resulting in a more enjoyable and memorable learning journey.

One of the keynote-speakers at the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education, the Canadian Professor of Education, Kieran Egan, also sees imaginative education as a means of engaging children emotionally in learning. Egan’s work, perhaps best exemplified in The Educated Mind (1997), has become a noticeable contender in effecting a paradigm shift in education that supports the recent developments in brain research. Rationality is not simply a set of computing skills; the mind works as a whole, and its whole includes our bodies and our emotions and imaginations. (Egan 2005, p.100) Egan builds on the philosophical premise that children learn more deeply and more profoundly through interacting with what they can imagine. He grounds his theoretical approach with practical ‘cognitive tools’ such as the use of story-telling, metaphor, binary opposites, jokes and humour, and association with heroes, etc. – mental and culturally inherited tools which become progressively more sophisticated as the child develops. As such, Egan provides a conceptual framework for understanding imaginative education as both a philosophically and methodologically very different approach to education than has been seen so far.

Note: if you want to know more about the upcoming 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education: “Imaginative Theory, Imaginative Practice”, to be held in Australia for the first time from Tuesday 29th January to Thursday 31th January, at the Rydges Hotel by the Lake, Canberra, please visit http://imaginativeeducation.org/conferences

REFERENCES

Damasio, A. R. (2003). Looking for Spinoza : Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. London: Harcourt.

Egan, K (1997). The Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding Chicago; University of Chicago Press.

Egan, K. (2005). An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass A Wiley Company.

LeDoux, J.E. (1996). The Emotional Brain. New York, Simon and Schuster.