Kieran Egan: Students’ minds and imagination

How do children’s minds develop? Is it through socialising, accumulating privileged knowledge (discovering ‘truth’ - not being told it), psychological development, cognitive tool acquisition? These were the theoretical foundations (dilemmas?) of Kieran’s informative but also very entertaining talk about Imaginative Education (IE) - a new approach to education that effectively engages students’ emotions, imaginations and intellects in learning.

IE is based on 5 distinctive kinds of understanding, the first three of which he elaborated on:

- somatic understanding (pre-linguistic) – experiencing the surroundings through our bodily senses, emotions (as fundamental organizers of cognition), humour, musicality, gestures and communication
- mythic understanding – understanding experience through oral narratives (human minds respond well to the story shape of narratives, metaphor lying ‘at the heart of human inventiveness, creativity and imagination’)
- romantic understanding – understanding experience through written language (human minds are always fascinated by the extraordinary, rare, strange, mysterious)
- philosophic understanding
- ironic understanding

All knowledge is human knowledge and if we strip it of all the emotions passions, hopes, etc. which were involved in its creation, it is bound to become dry and meaningless. This realisation seems to have serious implications for materials development and teaching in general.

If you are interested to find out more about this approach to learning and teaching and the Imaginative Education Research Group, please visit http://www.ierg.net or try and get hold of Egan, K (2005) An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.