Chris Lima: The place of imagination in ELT teacher education

Chris delivered a very inspiring talk, at the heart of which lay her invitation to teacher-trainers to resort to the world of fiction/imagination/metaphor when planning their teacher training courses.

She supported her strong beliefs about the benefits of using imagination for learning by reminding us that metaphors are an integral part of our daily life, refuting the preconceptions that they are a natural part of literature only. To prove her point, she invited us to illustrate our metaphor for teaching and share it with the people around us. Needless to say, there were no two same outcomes of the task, which suggested that metaphorical thinking has the power to deconstruct reality in the sense of eliciting multiple and creative (because personal) perspectives on the same concept.

Chris also suggested that resorting to metaphors in teacher training may create a safe and non-threatening environment for externalising the frequently subconscious and implicit teacher beliefs about teaching and learning. Indeed, for some teachers sharing personal teacher experiences can be seen as revelatory and therefore potentially threatening.

To Chris, the use of metaphors in education is unjustly mostly limited to primary education, while there is a lot of potential in this powerful teaching tool that can be used with adults, too. She even went as far as to suggest that metaphors should be the core medium through which teacher training can take place.

Chris claimed that imagination is closely related to knowledge and helps to mould and enrich it. Imagination is seen as an integral part of reflection,  embedded in the following cycle:

Knowledge – Reflection – Change

Change, she insisted, can only take place when teachers are able (via the medium of imagination) to consider multiple perspectives of the concept in question and choose the one which is most likely to lead to a positive change in their thinking system or related practice.

Apart from metaphors, imagination can be stimulated through the use of drama, poetry, music, visual arts, real/fictional narratives, etc.