Creative Courage and Imaginative Learning: New Perspectives on How Psychology and Philosophy Intersect in My Work at LCI

May, Rollo
The Courage to Create
New York: W.W. Norton, 1994
“Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world,” (54). Rollo May holds that creativity’s central importance is it’s bringing something new into being. I like this definition, and finding it in May’s text showed me an example of where May’s [...]

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 [...]

A Little Book Full of Big Ideas!

Cobb, Edith
The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood
Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1993
This is a book to sit with and enjoy over a cup of coffee, or to excitedly sneak a few pages of on a crowded subway; it is a book to discuss with friends, and a book to feed your teaching. Part biography, part philosophy, [...]

Greene’s Cultural Call to Action

Greene, Maxine
Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, Art, and Social Change
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995.
If you seek solace from the drone of daily life and envision a society in which our imagination enables us to strive together for a better, more engaged future, read this book! If you share my love for education, social justice, [...]

Putting the Flow into Aesthetic Education

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly
The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The Evolving Self is a follow-up to his popular Flow, and in this work he provides further insight into the cultivation of engaging, challenging experiences which he, over his more than 30 years as a researcher and psychologist, has called [...]

Creativity and Development: Gardner Offers Welcome Context with which to Understand our Artistic Nature

Gardner, Howard
Art, Mind & Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity
New York: Basic Books, 1998
I began reading Howard Gardner’s Art, Mind & Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity after having taught some challenging sixth-grade classes for LCI. As I boarded the train in the Bronx and headed home, I opened this book for the first time. [...]

I Believe in the Imagination!

Kearney provokes me, but ultimately I find we are on the same side.
Kearney, Richard
The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture
London: Routledge, 1994.
Perhaps it is because I am able to make my living as an artist, creating dances and teaching for an organization that holds imagination as paramount, but prior to reading Richard Kearney’s The [...]

Imagination is Central in Education: Warnock Sheds Light

Imagination
Warnock, Mary
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978
At LCI, we are almost always thinking about the imagination. I wonder about how our definition of – and advocacy for – imagination corresponds to that of psychological, philosophical, and educational theory. This book, though it takes some thoughtful time to digest, begins to discuss these connections.