The Role of Mental Imagery in Imaginative and Ecological Teaching

This article explores how mental imagery evoked from words might enhance the learning of cross-curricular content and how it may help cultivate students’ ecological understanding: that deep sense of connection to a living world and the care and concern to live differently within it. With reference to Elliott Eisner’s and Kieran Egan’s works, I offer a rationale for attending more fully to mental imagery in teaching. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications for more meaningful and engaging school experiences based on students’ and teachers’ imaginative engagement with curricularcontent

The Role of Mental Imagery in Imaginative and Ecological Teaching

This article explores how mental imagery evoked from words might enhance the learning of cross-curricular content and how it may help cultivate students’ ecological understanding: that deep sense of connection to a living world and the care and concern to live differently within it. With reference to Elliott Eisner’s and Kieran Egan’s works, I offer a rationale for attending more fully to mental imagery in teaching. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications for more meaningful and engaging school experiences based on students’ and teachers’ imaginative engagement with curricularcontent

A Dirty Little Secret

This article describes my tumultuous journey studying imagination in a graduate leadership seminar using an arts-based pedagogy called Performative Inquiry. Focusing on my own teaching and learning in this course, I share insights that inform my future teaching and can support colleagues interested in exploring imagination with their students. I accepted risks associated with arts-based performances and entered a shared space of vulnerability with my students. My struggles with resistance were real, and so too was the realization of the important role vulnerability plays in imagination-focused (leadership) education. I suggest that Performative Inquiry offers other (leadership) educators a powerful pedagogy and methodology for understanding imagination in their own lives and inquiring into their leadership education practices. Arts-based practices allow learners to feel their own imaginations and experience possibility by accepting invitations to be vulnerable, performing learning in a range of productive and generative ways

Adaptándose a nuevas formas de enseñanza dentro del programa “Aprender en Profundidad” / Adapting to new forms of teaching in the “Learning in Depth” program

It has long been argued that being educated entails satisfying two criteria: first, one must know many things about the world and, second, that one must know something in significant depth. There have been a number of proposals for attaining the depth criterion, none of them either clear or clearly successful. A curriculum innovation from Canada called “Learning in Depth” is a simple and practicable program for ensuring depth learning for all students, and it seems to merit wider experimental implementations. It also requires somewhat new forms of teaching.Por mucho tiempo se sostuvo que estar educado implica cumplir con dos criterios: en primer lugar, uno debe conocer muchas cosas acerca del mundo y, en segundo lugar, uno debe conocer algo en profundidad significativa. Para alcanzar el criterio de profundidad se han propuesto una cantidad de posibilidades, ninguna de las cuales resultó clara o claramente exitosa. Una innovación curricular desarrollada en Canadá y llamada “Aprender en Profundidad” constituye un programa simple y practicable para asegurar a todos los estudiantes un aprendizaje en profundidad y merece, en ese sentido, que se realicen implementaciones experimentales más amplias. Asimismo, requiere nuevas formas de enseñanza.

Toward More Effective Storytelling for Raising Environmental Awareness in Young Students

Abstract: This paper addresses the need to reclaim the value of storytelling as a tool for raising environmental awareness in young children. In distinguishing between 'knowledge' and 'awareness', the paper discusses the role that the sense of wonder evoked through shaping topics in story-form can play in encouraging awareness. Through imaginative and emotional engagement with issues and ideas, children can feel the significance of the natural world around them. The role of the Story of the Universe which presents the natural environment as a living organism, in which human beings and Nature co-exist, is also discussed

Engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning

Imagination is rarely acknowledged as one of the main workhorses of learn- ing. Unfortunately, disregarding the imagination has some clearly negative pedagogical impacts: Learning is more ineffective than it should be and much schooling is more tedious than it need be. In this paper, we outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of students’ language ed- ucation. We focus on the kinds of “cognitive tools” or learning “toolkits” human beings develop as they grow up, which connect emotion and imagi- nation with knowledge in the learning process. We show how employing these tools—indeed, how their central employment in all aspects of plan- ning—can make learning other languages engaging and meaningful

Imaginación, herramientas cognitivas y alumnos renuentes / Imagination, cognitive tools and reluctant students

This paper analyzes how children and teenagers whom we call “reluctant students” are often, anything but reluctant to learn some things. They show all kinds of signs of imaginative participation- but their participation seems unable to connect with the school syllabus. We could wonder: How could we manage to have a curriculum so imaginative and attractive as the world that is exposed to the students? A new answer for some or a lot of those students could come from Lev Vygotsky’s research (1962, 1997). His notion of “cognitive tools” gives us a way to explore how we could capture and involve those students’ imagination to make them see that, what is really wonderful and engaging in the syllabus, could be learnt by anyone and could be turned into a cognitive tool. In this paper we shall see how the cognitive tools to make up stories, the binary opposites and the images generated through words, could be used in a new way. Each of them was at one point, a considerable important cultural invention, and each of them turns now, into a potential cognitive tool to increase our ability to think, communicate and understand.El presenta articulo analiza como los niños y adolescentes a los que denominamos “alumnos renuentes” son, a menudo, cualquier cosa menos renuentes a aprender ciertas cosas. Ellos muestran todos los signos de participación imaginativa—solo que su imaginación parece incapaz de conectarse con cualquier parte del curriculum escolar. Podríamos preguntar ¿cómo podemos hacer que el curriculum sea tan imaginativamente atractivo como el mundo que se supone debería exponerse a los estudiantes? Una nueva respuesta para algunos o muchos de esos estudiantes podría derivarse del trabajo de Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1997). Su noción de “herramientas cognitivas” nos ofrece una forma de explorar cómo podemos captar y comprometer la imaginación de esos estudiantes para que vean lo que es verdaderamente maravilloso y atrapante en el currículo cualquiera pudiera aprender y convertirla en una herramienta cognitiva. En este articulo veremos cómo las herramientas de estructuración de historias/relatos, los opuestos binarios, y la generación de imágenes a partir de las palabras pueden emplearse de maneras, en cierta medida, nuevas. Cada una de ellas fue en algún momento una invención cultural de importancia considerable, y cada una ahora se ha convertido, potencialmente para cada uno de nosotros, en herramientas cognitivas que pueden aumentar nuestra capacidad para pensar, comunicarnos y comprender. 

Imaginative ecological education

This research investigates how school-based Ecological Education programs currently develop students’ ecological understanding (an awareness of humankind’s interconnectedness within the natural world) and how these programs may do so more effectively. Insight into how to support the development of ecological understanding may be found in Imaginative Education, an approach to teaching that situates engagement of the body, emotion and imagination at the core of all learning.Three questions guide the research. The first seeks to clarify the goals of Ecological Education and to articulate the kinds of pedagogical practices currently in place to support their achievement. It becomes clear that, among other problems, the means and ends of Ecological Education are misaligned. Despite the fact that emotional and imaginative engagement with the natural world is considered important for nurturing students’ relationships with nature, emotion and imagination play a limited role in the theory and practice of Ecological Education. Similarly, while one often sees students actively involved in experiential types of learning activities in Ecological Education programs, the kinds of activities students are participating in may not be contributing in meaningful ways to the body’s understanding of a topic. How engagement of the body, emotion and imagination in learning may play a more central role in Ecological Education is the focus of the second research question. A description of the theory and practice of Imaginative Education reveals an educational approach in which culturally-based learning tools bring engagement of the body, emotion and imagination together in practice. The principles of Imaginative Education may be used, with some adaptation, in the context of Ecological Education. The third research question asks what form a marriage of Ecological Education and Imaginative Education might take. I outline an ecologically imaginative pedagogy focused on the cultivation of students’ close, personal relationships with the local natural environment and shaped by engagement of the body, emotion and imagination in learning. This framework for Imaginative Ecological Education may be used for teaching any topic and has the potential to support students in forming the kinds of emotional connections with the natural world that underlie ecological understanding

A Walking Curriculum: From “Good Ideas for Walks” to Transformative Design for Eco-Social Change

This pilot implementation study examines the experiences of ten teachers who have employed a place-based learning resource called A Walking Curriculum for one to three years. A Walking Curriculum is an example of Imaginative Ecological Education—a pedagogical approach that centralizes imaginative engagement, emotional connection, and somatic understanding in place-based learning. Initially, researchers sought to understand teachers’ practices and to determine how (or if) A Walking Curriculum provided teachers with a deeper insight into the principles of Imaginative Ecological Education underlying it. The research focus shifted to the nature of professional development and the meaning of educational change in a more-than-human world. This article considers policy implications of an ecological model of educational change that might better align with the eco-social transformation intentions of Imaginative Ecological Education.Cette étude pilote examine les expériences de dix enseignants qui ont utilisé pendant un à trois ans une ressource éducative axée sur le lieu qui s’appelle A Walking Curriculum (« Curriculum pour la marche »). Cette ressource est un exemple d’Enseignement écologique et imaginatif, une approche pédagogique qui situe l’engagement imaginatif, la connexion émotionnelle et la compréhension somatique dans un apprentissage axé sur le lieu. Au départ, les chercheurs voulaient comprendre les pratiques des enseignants et déterminer comment (ou si) A Walking Curriculum permettait à ces derniers de mieux comprendre les principes de l’Enseignement écologique et imaginatif sous-tendant cette ressource éducative. La recherche a ensuite porté sur la nature du développement professionnel et sur la signification des changements éducatifs dans un monde plus qu’humain. Cet article examine les implications politiques d’un modèle écologique de changement éducatif qui pourrait mieux s’aligner sur les intentions de transformation éco-sociale de l’Enseignement écologique et imaginatif