The Workings of the Imagination: Full of Contradictions

Egan, Kieran, Maureen Stout, and Keiichi Takaya, eds.
Teaching and Learning Outside the Box: Inspiring Imagination Across the Curriculum
New York: Teachers College Press, 2007

Much to the vexation of my friends and family, I love to play devil’s advocate, arguing an opposing side just for the sake of considering it and as a way to expand the dialogue around a topic. (One downside of this is that it can convey false information about my beliefs to those who don’t understand my compulsion.) In Teaching and Learning Outside the Box, a team of editors satisfyingly lays out multiple sides of the conversation on imagination and education from nine voices, while contradicting some of my previous reading and thoughts. For me, it provided a thought provoking and supremely rewarding journey.

In the first chapter, Kieran Egan succinctly presents an overview of the evolution of the meaning and place of imagination in Western society and its historical role in education. Keiichi Takaya then pinpoints several key concepts of imaginative processes, including unusualness, effectiveness, and conscious will, and discusses imagination’s role in contemporary society. Maureen Stout continues, outlining and discussing the process of a paradigm shift in imagination in education research. From there additional authors tackle the manifestations and implications of imagination in specific subject areas including mathematics, science, literature, and the arts.

One common viewpoint among the authors here that contradicts others I’ve reviewed lies in the scope of the definition of imagination as it relates to education. These authors make a clear distinction between imagination as a capacity and mental imagery, such as picturing representational objects in one’s mind, fantasizing, and dreaming/day dreaming. In Living by Wonder, Richard Lewis utilizes day dreaming journeys in his work with children to foster imagination. In The House of Make Believe, Singer and Singer point directly to fantasy—or imaginative play as they call it—in childhood development and education. Part of the issue here may be semantic, but the educators and researchers represented in Teaching and Learning Outside the Box approach imagination as a functional capacity, used to produce the unusual and effective, thereby leading to improvement in society. Imagination for these authors is active and productive, not passive and wandering.

Another point of distinction lies in ideas about the development of imagination. One school of thought argues that imagination is inherent at birth, peaking in early childhood, and their argument goes something like this: 1) free association, an act interpreted by many adults as highly imaginative, is most readily seen and observed in early childhood; 2) this imaginative capacity is then beaten out little by little as one goes through the rigors of the current educational system. Adherents to this viewpoint seek an educational method that works to maximize the imagination at its perceived highpoint. While novelty is significant in both models, the authors here place greater importance on intellect, with knowledge, skill, and curiosity as prerequisites to imaginative activity.

Takaya points out that people aren’t imaginative in general in all areas of their lives. Where an individual’s imagination functions most prominently, and to the greatest benefit for society, is in an area in which (s)he has gained a depth of knowledge and struggles to solve problems. This brings emotion into the picture and on this point there is more agreement. It seems clear that imagination utilizes both affective and cognitive functions. The difference here is that, for authors featured in the present volume, it is not separate from the intellect.

Just as Lincoln Center Institute’s pedagogical practice positions imagination as central to the development of 21^st-century skills, Teaching and Learning Outside the Box considers it of central significance within western culture. “Today, by and large, imagination is seen as a part of healthier or more balanced rationality” (31). Imagination is a way to become acutely aware of the world and is a necessary part of being a perceptive, critical, and flexible participant in society.

Frantic episodes of cryptic shorthand accompanied my reading of this thought provoking text. (In the act of writing, my hand can never keep up with my brain, one of the mind body disconnections I encounter.) The book helped me to clarify my working definition of imagination and aided me in developing a clearer understanding of the active functioning of the imagination. I highly recommend it either as a primer to the current dialogue in the field or to spur your own thoughts and opinions about the role and complexity of imagination.

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