Advocacy for Imagination in Sociocultural Literacy: Implications for Aesthetic Education

Gallas, Karen
Imagination and Literacy: A Teacher’s Search for the Heart of Literacy
New York: Teachers College Press, 2003

Karen Gallas is an experienced and revered teacher of children, and Imagination and Literacy is part of The Practitioner Inquiry Series from Teachers College Press. These credentials, alone, recommend this book. This work is a thoughtful account, in which Gallas presents her research in favor of creating open space for imagination in our classrooms. I believe her articulate and thoughtful study can help those of us who are passionate about the role of aesthetic inquiry and the arts to advocate for our work as a key component of a complete education. This work could also potentially help us to deepen our existing partnerships with teachers and to articulate in educational terms as advocates for the imagination in all classrooms. If we listen to this book, these conversations might begin with literacy as a starting point, but I believe Gallas allows and encourages plenty of room to branch out, and ultimately comes to acknowledge imagination as something central in and of itself.

Gallas points out that in education, discussion of the imagination is not new, but that this discourse has not been an integral aspect of most educational conversations. I wonder if this book’s importance as a key resource might be for this very reason. She states that while study of the imagination has indeed been a focus in some other arenas (it has been studied by philosophers, artists, psychologists, etc), these thinkers have generally produced accounts of the adult of imagination at work. I have blogged about some of these here before: in Gallas’s work I notice brief citing of the work of Edith Cobb and Mary Warnock (who I wrote about in previous posts), and she also mentions both Howard Gardner and Maxine Greene briefly in her introduction.

Gallas’s hypothesis that imagination is central to learning literacy began forming as she watched a particular struggling student. Already an advocate for the imagination, she set out to better understand it and to help this particular student engage educationally. Through Imagination and Literacy she traces her thought and research process. As such, she seems at first specifically interested in the central role imagination plays in literacy. Initially, this made me slightly hesitant, as I believe the imagination is so central to education and to life that it is not just a means to literacy, but of value in and of itself. However, as Gallas continued her research she, too, grew to value imagination beyond any specific subject or discipline, to believe it so fundamental as to ultimately articulate it as a key component of sociocultural literacy.

Gallas holds the view that “…the human organism is remarkable precisely because the myriad ways in which it grows and adapts cannot be fully quantified” (5). She freely acknowledges that studying the imagination is by nature somewhat ambiguous, free flowing, and unclear: imagination is not necessarily easily pinned down, but she believes that discussing it and attempting to understand it is central to seeing patterns, to improving understanding, and to bettering education in response. Her thorough research process was circularly integrated into the forming of her theories, and she mentions that she would observe children, refine theory, observe children again later with this in mind, and re-synthesize theory…. I believe she is extremely self-reflective and engaged researcher who honed her methods clearly and took great personal interest in her subject matter.

Gallas used ethnographic methods to conduct her studies, compiling information while teaching in both a diverse urban community near Boston and a rural community in California. (She discusses ethnography in some detail in chapter 8.) The book compiles anecdotes from her own experiences with many young children: not planned teacher activities, she makes clear, but everyday incidents. To do the research, she set up her classroom in a particular manner, making new spaces where her students could “…flex their imaginative muscles, as it were, so that I would have opportunities to observe and document their work,” (7). Her description of her classroom sounds amazing. In addition to anecdotal evidence and reflections on her interactions she also includes some brief transcripts of conversations, journal entries, and children’s drawings.

She introduces each section with a “frame,” something she thinks of as a way to express some of her own “aha!” moments to the reader. She says these “frames” are her way of inviting the reader in, something like “looking through a window frame or camera lens and looking at a landscape I had not seen before,” (9). I love this. These “frames” include field notes that led her to study imagination as a phenomenon, a poem that for her linked imagination as central to literacy, and a re-discovered personal journal entry that expresses how imagination is so key within expertise.

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