Kieran Egan’s book, Imagination in Teaching and Learning

The first main characteristic of imaginative lives is the connection to stories. When emo

While our students are becoming aware of the complexity of the real world outside themselves and their environment they start exploring. These students have the notion that if they discover everything there is to know about something they will gain a better sense of reality. We see this detail oriented obsession in their hobbies and collections. These actions give them an intellectual hold over something; they are able to learn the limitations of that hobby and what it would take to complete it. Our students are looking for that grasp on details in some area of their knowledge base. As teachers we can use this in our lesson plans and engage them in the material of the lesson by letting them become detail oriented and discover everything they want to know on a subject.

How in a multi-cultural, capitalistic society, such as America, can we implement this idea of developing the imagination of our middle school students? My suggestion would be that we do not say, as educators, that we are engaging our students’ imaginations. It seems to me in our society that we associate an imaginative child to a daydreamer. The first thought of a daydreaming student is one that is not paying attention, one that is not engaged in learning and someone that is lazy. So to tell parents that we are developing imaginations of our students might get some resistance. What we need to do is get rid of that stigma. Imagination is more than make-believe; imagination in middle school students can only enhance their creativity and understanding of the reality in which they exist.

My one criticism I have from this chapter is the general assumption of how easy these interests would be to incorporate in the lesson planning. This could be something he expands more on in later chapters, but for now I feel that he made it all sound so simple to implement. As I was reading the chapter I kept catching myself thinking of ways I could take this love of “romanticism” and put that towards math or geography. How could I make the historical figures all out to be heroic in some nature? I guess the idea that I wanted him to give real life examples for each topic says something about the way I work. Do I really want to be spoon-fed how to run my classroom? No, I do not, but I feel that if he would have given one or two real life examples of how to implement these topics into lessons it would have given a more realistic view of what he was trying to say. Saying that, I will say that this chapter has inspired me to look more at my student’s interests and imaginative development needs first, then deal with how to engage them in the materials I need them to learn.

Starting with extremes and limits Egan explains how students of this age bracket will be more engaged with the type of knowledge that shows the human experience at its limits (the most courageous, the cruelest, most bizarre, the strange, the terrible and the wonderful). The more different the topic is to the student the more interesting and engaging it becomes. It is through these extremes and limits that we are able to see the everyday existence in a new light, and from there we are able to learn where the familiar fits and what it means. By using a different perspective than the ones our students see everyday we are able to better engage them in learning and imaginat

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