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Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education

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Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education Kansas State University Libraries New Prairie Press 2000 Conference Proceedings (Vancouver, BC, Adult Education Research Conference Canada) Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education Ron Norman Castlegar, British Columbia, Canada Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/aerc Part of the Adult and Continuing Education Administration Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License Recommended Citation Norman, Ron (2000). "Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2000/papers/63 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences at New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Adult Education Research Conference by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education Ron Norman Castlegar, British Columbia, Canada Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of imagination in teaching and learning, and to explore how Kieran Egan’s (1992) concept of “imaginative learning” contributes to adult edu- cation theory and practice. Introduction look at imaginative learning’s place within a phi- The poet Archibald MacLeish (Williams, 1970, losophy of practice. p.887) once commented at the height of the Cold War that the “real crisis” facing modern society The Role of Imagination in Education wasn’t nuclear holocaust, but the demise of imagi- Egan contends that developing imagination is nation: crucial in education. The question that must be asked is: why? There are a whole range of reasons. To me – not many others think so – the real For instance, imagination helps transcend conven- crisis in the life of our society is the crisis of tional thinking, or as Karen Hanson (1988, p. 138) the life of the imagination. Far more than we writes: “Imagination is what allows us to envision need an intercontinental missile or a moral possibilities in or beyond the actualities in which rearmament or a religious revival, we need to we are immersed.” Imagination is the ability to con- come alive again, to recover the virility of the sciously conceive of the unconventional, or, to imagination on which all earlier civilizations paraphrase Coleridge, it is thinking unsubdued by have been based: Coleridge’s ‘synthetic and habit and unshackled by custom. Imagination is also magical power’ by which ‘the whole soul of closely connected with creativity. Immanual Kant man’ may be brought to activity and know l- ([1790] 1952, p. 134) notes: “The imagination is a edge may be known. powerful agent for creating as it were a second na- ture out of the material supplied to it by actual na- Nearly 35 years later, Kieran Egan (1992) ech- ture.” Then there is the role imagination plays in the oes MacLeish. However, the focus of Egan’s con- development of what Brian Sutton-Smith (1988, p. cern is not society, but education. Egan argues that 22) calls the “narrative concern”. Sutton-Smith educators are not doing enough to foster imagina- claims that people make sense of the world and of tion in students, that imagination has been relegated our experiences in narratives and that we recall to the dusty cloakroom at the back of the educa- items in narrative structures better than in logically- tional classroom. Just as significantly, the failure to organized lists. Imagination is not only a vital com- stimulate and develop the imagination in teaching ponent in the composition of narratives, but also in and learning shapes education theory and practice. understanding narratives. As Northrup Frye (1963, “So much of the focus on students’ cognition is in p. 49) points out: “The art of listening to stories is a terms of logico-mathematical skills that our very basic training for the imagination.” concept of education becomes affected,” Egan says Egan has his own reasons for promoting imagi- (1992, p.5). nation’s importance in education. One is that In this paper I will examine the role of imagina- imagination plays a key role in the learning process. tion in education and explore a framework for de- There is a view common in both society at large and veloping what Egan calls “imaginative learning” in the education system that the human mind is a (1992, p. 53). I will also set out how imaginative sort of computer in which information is stored for learning fits within the broader goals of adult edu- later retrieval, such as on a test. Egan writes: “This cation. As well, I will identify and discuss potential has been going on so long and so ubiquitously in problems with imaginative learning. Finally, I will schools that the meaning of learning that is most common is this kind of mechanical storage and re- trieval” (p. 50). Egan argues, and I agree, that the knowledge, but also about the meaning that know l- human mind does not work in the same way as a edge has for the individual. He argues that what is computer and that our memories are quite unlike absent from what he calls the “neo-conservative computer “memories”: curriculum”, which stresses knowing a lot, is “at- tention to, and a clear sense of, how knowledge be- The human mind does not simply store facts comes meaningful in the lives of learners; how we discretely when it learns. Perhaps it can do can ensure that students engage, in the sense I am this, and we might occasionally use this ca- developing the phrase here, in imaginative learn- pacity to remember a phone number or a ing” (p.53). Teaching and learning which ignores shopping list in the absence of a piece of pa- the imagination--or what Egan calls “imaginative per. More typically when we learn even the learning”--ignores a central component that will simplest fact – that Vasco de Gama set off help learners to make meaning of their experience. from Lisbon to sail to Africa in 1497 or that Put another way, ensuring that knowledge and skills spiders have eight legs – we do not simply are meaningful requires engaging the imagination in lodge these as discrete data in our brains. the process of learning. When learned, they mix in with the complex of shifting emotions, memories, intentions, A Framework for Developing and so on that constitute our mental lives . Imaginative Learning .Whether and how we learn and retain these Egan provides a framework, or model, to help particular facts is affected by the complex of teachers plan lessons or units in such a way that meaning structures we already have in place, students’ imaginations will most likely be engaged. which in turn are affected by our emotions, However, the framework refrains from establishing intentions, and so on. (p. 50) learning objectives. Rather, taking a cue from Sut- ton-Smith’s emphasis on the narrative, the curric u- The point is that almost nothing emerges from lum is set within a narrative structure. Egan (p. 64) human memory in the same form that it was ini- points to the primary role that narrative can play in tially learned. All kinds of associations are made making meaning of experience: with each new fact or bit of data, and these associa- tions are constantly shifting and blending, being The development of the narrative capacities constructed, taken apart and reconstructed. And of the mind, of its ready use of metaphor, of imagination is a crucial part of that process. its integration of cognitive and affective, of Another reason why Egan believes imagination its sense-making and meaning-making, and is vital to education is related to Sutton-Smith’s of its overarching imagination, is of educa- idea of the “narrative concern”: imagination helps tional importance because these capacities provide meaning to experience and understanding are so central to our general capacity to make to knowledge. MacLeish makes this point when he meaning out of our experience. says that imagination is important, in part, because it is how “knowledge may be known”(p.887). In Barbara Hardy (1968, p. 5) goes even further in other words, it provides understanding that goes detailing narrative’s role in individual lives: “We beyond facts. Though he doesn’t call it “logico- dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remem- mathematical” thinking (as does Egan), MacLeish ber, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, is clearly critical of the trend toward thinking that revise, criticize, gossip, learn, hate and live by nar- relies solely, or even heavily, on facts: “We are de l- rative.” The development of the “narrative concern” uged with facts, but we have lost, or are losing, our is, arguably, educationally relevant to any teaching human ability to feel them. Which means that we practice. (By narrative, I don’t mean fictional nar- have lost or are losing our ability to comprehend the rative, but rather the narrative shaping of content). facts of our experience. .” (p. 887). The narrative, then, forms the basis for the Egan makes a similar point when he says that framework. But what must be included within this education--by which he means the formal process narrative? Certainly, we must include characteris- of teaching and learning within an established tics that engage learners’ imaginations. Egan sug- structure--is not only about the accumulation of gests several, among them: transcendent human out, meaning-making is a crucial element of adult qualities that are central to the topic (and the affec- education. tive images they evoke) such as romance, wonder, Brookfield says one of the goals of adult educa- awe, heroism, revolt and idealism. Egan then sug- tion is assisting learners in the creation and re- gests pursuing the content through details and by creation of their worlds: humanizing the knowledge.
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