An Imaginative Approach to Teaching

In this book, award-winning educator Kieran Egan shows how we can transform the experience of K-12 students and help them become more knowledgeable and more creative in their thinking. At the core of this transformative process is imagination which can become the heart of effective learning if it is tied to education's central tasks. An Imaginative Approach to Teaching is a groundbreaking book that offers an understanding of how students' imaginations work in learning and shows how the acquisition of cognitive tools drives students' educational development. This approach is unique in that it engages both the imagination and emotions. The author clearly demonstrates how knowledge comes to life in students' minds if it is introduced in the context of human hopes, fears, and passions. To facilitate this new educational approach, the book includes a wide variety of effective teaching tools - such as story, rhythm, play, opposition, agency, and meta-narrative understanding - that value and build upon the way children understand their experiences. Most important, Egan provides frameworks for lesson planning and more than a dozen sample lessons to show how teachers can use these tools to awaken intelligence and imagination in the classroom.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Imagination Underfoot xi

Chapter One: A Tool Kit for Learning 1
Story, Metaphor, Binary opposites, Rhyme, rhythm, and pattern, Jokes and humor, Mental imagery, Gossip, Play, Mystery, Embryonic tools of literacy

Chapter One and a Half: Examples in Everyday Classrooms 39

Chapter Two: A Tool Kit for Literacy 77
Sense of reality, Extremes of experience and limits of reality, Association with heroes, Sense of wonder, Collections and hobbies, Knowledge and human meaning, Narrative understanding, Revolt and idealism, Changing the context, Literate eye, Embryonic tools of theoretic thinking

Chapter Two and a Half: Examples in Everyday Classrooms 109

Chapter Three: A Tool Kit for Theoretic Thinking 151
Sense of abstract reality, Sense of agency, Grasp of general ideas and their anomalies, Search for authority and truth, Meta-narrative understanding Chapter Three and a Half:

Examples in Everyday Classrooms 171

Conclusion: Imagination Every Day 209

Glossary 219

Appendix A: Mythic Framework 223

Appendix B: Romantic Framework 227

Appendix C: Philosophic Framework 231

Bibliography 235

The Author 237

Index 239

Kieran Egan is professor of education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His work focuses on teaching practices that develop a child's imagination. Dr. Egan is recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award and a member of the National Academy of Education. He is also author of numerous books, including The Educated Mind and Teaching as Storytelling. Praise for an imaginative approach to teaching

"As we come to expect from Kieran Egan, this book is imaginative, engaging, wise, and practical. A terrific resource for teachers at every level."
—Nel Noddings, author, Happiness and Education and Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita, Stanford University

"Kieran Egan's work on imagination and learning has addressed our needs as teachers to foster more creative thinking within our classrooms. Tapping into this creative energy has added a whole new level of fascination, not to mention fulfillment, to our 'middle years' teaching. We encourage all educators to use the book to put this unbelievable theory into practice in the near future!"
—Anne-Marie Dooner, Peter Obendoerfer, Nicole Marie Kerbrat, and Principal Verland Hicks, middle school educators, Ecole Leila North Community School, Winnipeg, Manitoba