Values and Imagination in Teaching

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2009 doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00455.x

Values and Imagination in Teaching: With a Special Focus on Social Studies Blackwell Oxford, Educational EPAT © 0013-1857 Journal July 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00455.x 455 1 0 Original 140???

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2008 2008 Egan and UK The compilation Articles Publishing Imagination Philosophy Author & Gillian ©Ltd Judson 2008 and in Teaching Philosophy Theory of Education Society of Australasia

Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson Simon Fraser University, British Columbia Submitted: 27 April 2008; Revised: 03 June 2008; Accepted: 09 June 2008 Abstract Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is true of Social Studies is also largely reflected in general texts concerning planning teaching. Clearly many theorists and practitioners are concerned to engage students’ imaginations in learning, even though they use terms other than ‘imagination’ in doing so. This article suggests that a more explicit attention to imagination can make our efforts to engage students in learning more effective. We provide, first, a working definition of imagination, then show how students’ imaginations can be characterized in terms of the ‘cognitive toolkits’ they bring to learning. We look at such ‘cognitive tools’ as stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery and how these can be used to engage students’ imaginations in learning Social Studies and other content from kindergarten to about grade four. We then consider ‘cognitive tools’ commonly deployed by students from about grade four to grade nine, including a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic. We also provide examples of how using such tools could influence planning and teaching Social Studies topics.

Keywords: imagination, values, social studies

Introduction The Social Studies was developed and promoted as a humanizing core for the curriculum, making connections to all subjects from the daily living experience of students. It was designed to deal meaningfully with the daily experience of students and gradually connect that experience with global issues and crises of the student’s world. One prominent tool for achieving this aim, though one not commonly referred to in the literature of Social Studies directed towards teachers, is the imagination. As we will discuss, seeing connections between students’ experience © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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and knowledge of the world and especially recognizing the human dimensions of that knowledge are tasks more effectively managed if the imagination is engaged.

Central to our imaginations is our emotional engagement. We aim to show how knowledge becomes much more meaningful to students when their emotions and imaginations are engaged in the learning process. The imagination also provides a conduit from the topics we might be dealing with in any particular lesson to the global ethical issues those topics can elucidate.

There have, of course, been a number of attempts to suggest ways in which teachers might encourage students’ imaginative engagement with the knowledge of the curriculum, but, on the whole, they have lacked compelling force. That is, sometimes they have provided good ideas teachers might use in particular situations, but it is hard to come across clear principles that have applicability across the range of topics that are taught in the curriculum at large and even the Social Studies in particular. It is hard also to find such principles in a form that can lead to fairly routine engagement of students’ imaginations in learning. In part, the problem is connected with just the difficulty of clarifying what we mean by the imagination. We tend to use the word casually in the assumption that others will understand what we mean.

In this article we will describe a set of principles of learning derived from how the imagination typically operates in students today. First we will discuss what is generally meant by the imagination, and then we will examine some of the ‘tools’ the imagination uses in grappling onto curriculum content. We will describe a set of principles for engaging the imagination appropriate for the early grades, K through 4, and then a further set appropriate for students from grades 5 to 9. Our primary aim is to show how gaining a clearer sense of the imagination and bringing the imagination to the fore leads to practical methods and techniques that can be used in everyday classroom instruction. We will conclude by giving some examples of how these principles can be routinely used by teachers to engage students’ imaginations with Social Studies content.

Some Features of the Imagination What is the imagination? Well, one of the best-supported definitions comes from the work of Alan White, who concludes that the term refers to our ability to think of the possible (White, 1990). That stark definition also carries a penumbra of other associations, most simply that the imagination is a form of thinking not tied only to the actual (though the actual is also possible, and we can imagine actualities— we can imagine one of our colleagues in an airplane traveling to China as we write and which she is actually doing). The imaginative person, then, is one whose thinking is not constrained only by the actual. We have all met people who may infuriate us when we propose some change, whose objections all turn out to be due to their being unable to imagine conditions different from those they currently have come to take for granted. The ability to think of the possible also suggests a flexibility of mind that can operate in all areas of our thinking. Imagination also is not some kind of frothy, ‘artsy’, ineffective thinking. The imaginative person, in © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

128 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson Barrow’s (1988) terms, thinks in ways that combine two qualities: the unusual and effective.

We tend to value imaginative thinking for its flexibility, which shows itself, when thinking about issues, in its generation of unusual and effective possibilities. At least, this captures some of the central components of imaginative thinking. It has never been an easy concept to pin down, and has gone through a history in which those in authority have commonly mistrusted it and discouraged its exercise and development (Kearney, 1988).

Imagination is also tied up with our emotions and bodies and is thus as much about feeling and perceiving as it is about thinking. Our bodies provide the basic mediating tools through which we make sense of the world. It is important for imaginative teaching to combine the cognitive features of imagination with their manifestations in our earlier interactions with our environment.

This protean, flexible, unusual and effective kind of thinking is not easy to pin down.

It is, however, easy to understand why it has been commonly neglected in educational literature concerned with teachers and their development: it’s just hard to be precise about and consequently hard to prescribe methods that will encourage it. The longstanding National Council for Social Studies statement on ‘Social Studies for Young Children’ doesn’t include, among the thinking skills that students should develop, any reference to the imagination, and the word only appears in the statement as an assumption that young children have imagination as some kind of motivator for them to engage with their environment (http://www.socialstudies.org/positions/children/). None of the chapters on elementary, middle and secondary education in the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (1996) contains any topic related to the engagement of students’ imaginations.

Also, none of the chapters related to teachers’ knowledge in the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (1996) makes any reference to the imagination.

Munby, Russell and Martin’s (2001) overview of the research on teachers’ knowledge from the early 1960s includes no mention of the imagination. Similarly, none of Ducharme and Ducharme’s (1996) thirteen areas of ‘Needed Research in Teacher Education’ addresses teacher educators’ imaginations, encouragement of students’ imaginations, or imaginative curriculum planning. In fact, the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (1996) does not even include ‘imagination’ in the subject index. Nor is the imagination included in the index of the Handbook of Research on Curriculum (1992). Imagination, it seems, is not recognized as central to the process of teaching or how one learns to teach.

The notion of imagination sketched above might not be an entirely satisfactory definition, but it at least can serve to point us in the direction of characteristics of students’ thinking and learning that are more close to what is generally meant by the imagination. One way to begin working in this direction is to analyze students’ thinking when they are cognitively and emotionally engaged in something. By doing this it isn’t too difficult to sketch a brief inventory of some of the characteristics of the activities they spontaneously engage in with their imaginations clearly alert.

For example, if we are considering primary aged students we can observe some common features in the activities that engage their emotions and imaginations. © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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The Imagination and Its Tools in the Primary Years The Story Form Consider that emblematic activity of the young student being imaginatively engaged in a fairy tale. What can that tell us about the tools they are using to make sense of the events of the story, and how can we use those tools in helping them to make sense of the regular content of the curriculum? The first simple inference we can make is that the story-form itself somehow engages children’s imaginations. Human beings tend to make sense of the world in narrative ways. For example, we more readily remember a story—who was involved, what happened and how it ended—than we do lists. The unique thing about stories is how they are interconnected with our emotions.

What are stories? Stories are those linguistic units that shape for us how we should feel about their contents. That is, stories are about shaping emotions to events and characters. The story is not restricted to fictional events and characters, of course. Neither the newspaper editor who asks a reporter to find out ‘What’s the story on the riot at the football stadium?’ nor the friend who asks ‘What’s the story about your neighbor’s back-yard excavations?’ is asking for a fiction. They are asking that a narrative be created in which the emotional importance of the content is brought out as clearly as possible.

If we see the story-form as one of the tools of engaging students’ imaginations in learning, we might start planning our lessons by asking ‘What’s the story on x?’ rather than ‘What are my objectives in teaching x?’ The questions might bring out similar features in the content we teach, but they orient the teacher’s mind quite differently to the content and how it may be organized for teaching. The content of any curriculum area can be shaped in narrative or story form. In Social Studies teaching, as we have practiced it, it is always possible to introduce the curriculum in narrative terms. The students are interested in hearing about who was involved in the story of the French Revolution, for example. They want to know about the ‘characters’ in the story and how each contributes to the ‘plot’. By so shaping the content, students’ emotions will be tied up with the facts and events as they are learning, and the facts and events will consequently become more meaningful in the process.

Forming Mental Images Another tool we can see children using as they engage with stories that they enjoy is the formation of images in their minds. The images that the word ‘imagination’ is so obviously tied up with are not always the kinds of quasi-pictures we can call up, though such images are perhaps our commonest association with imagining.

The images we form in the mind from words are unlike anything else we are familiar with. We sometimes think of these images as a bit like a cinema playing in the head. But we can form images of smells and tastes, and even the quasi-pictorial images really aren’t much like pictures. These mental images usually, perhaps always, have some emotional quality attached to them and can have, thus, a powerful impact on us (Warnock, 1976). © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

130 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson If we were to describe a meeting we just had in a Japanese garden at our university to discuss how we might organize the rest of this article, we would include details such as: We sat on two broad gray basalt stones that surround the pond, and noticed that two yellow water lily flowers had come into bloom, and the miniature Japanese maple was looking its best with its rich deep red-brown leaves moving in the breeze. The water falling into the pond was glittering in the sun and sounded quite musical. Now, whether you like it or not, you will likely have formed some kind of image of the event. And you might even have formed some, however slight, affective response to the event. You might also reflect on how you respond to the information that we just made up the whole incident and it never occurred.

The formation of images from words—about events, characters, places—very commonly involves the imagination and very commonly also involves, in however small a degree, our emotions.

When teaching and planning teaching, it has become common to ask teachers to focus on the content and the concepts they want to teach. It is much less common—indeed, in our review of documents concerning Social Studies teaching, it is vanishingly rare—that teachers are recommended to find the emotionally charged image in a topic. Yet it is precisely such images that capture the imagination and communicate information about the content most vividly. It seems a bit odd to ignore what is one of the most potent tools available to us for effective teaching.

(Good teachers don’t ignore such images, of course. But our concern is that there is virtually nothing in the literature of teacher education or Social Studies education to encourage teachers to find such images and use them consistently.)

Abstract Binary Oppositions Another tool we see commonly at work in children’s spontaneous engagement is the structuring device of binary oppositions. Consider the kinds of stories that children find most engaging, such as the Grimm fairy tales. Each story is built on top of a powerful structuring device of oppositions between such abstract and affective concepts as love and hate, anxiety and security, riches and poverty, courage and cowardice, and, most generally, good and bad. Part of the odder folklore of teaching today is that young children are ‘concrete thinkers’. Yet, if we look at what most readily engages them, we can see powerful abstract opposite concepts very prominent. (These tools don’t disappear as we grow older, of course. If you look at TV shows and movies aimed at a wide audience, you will find the same underlying binary concepts doing their engaging work.)

We are not proposing that we should teach such oppositional concepts to children.

It would be a waste of time, because they already have them. They seem to come along with language. Bettelheim, for example, notes the ‘manner in which [children] can bring some order into [their] world by dividing everything into opposites’ (1976, p. 74). Our point is that we should use these powerful grappling tools of the imagination. Seeing binary oppositions within any topic attracts students to gain a first hold on them. We can then seek to mediate or elaborate the binary concepts, but we should recognize their power in giving access to knowledge in the © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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first place, and giving order to it in greater or lesser degree. And all topics can be seen in terms of some underlying binary opposition, as we’ll see in the examples later.

Also, using such oppositions doesn’t require us to falsify the content they are used on; they may simplify it, but all our descriptions and accounts involve simplifications.

Jokes and Humor Another prominent component of the young students’ toolkit is humor. Educators have typically neglected humor or considered it something that might be of some value as a motivational device to be used by teachers who are inclined to be humorous—as though it is a characteristic that some teachers have and others don’t, and not something that is worth cultivating as an important pedagogical tool. It seems to us that the stimulation and development of humor in both teachers and students is among the important constituents of a program of education.

Humor, of course, comes in many forms. But basic to much of the humor that engages younger students is incongruity. Take the following jokes: Why did Billy cross the playground?

To get to the other slide. *** Why was the tomato blushing?

Because he saw the salad dressing. *** Teacher: Jane, what’s the outside of a tree called?

Jane: I don’t know.

Teacher: Bark, Jane, bark.

Jane: Bow, wow, wow.

These jokes play with language in such a way that, to get the joke, you have to recognize the language game being played. You have to see language as an object on which you can reflect. Language is as much a human behavior as the working of your liver, but it is one of these odd shared behaviors that make culture possible.

Becoming conscious of it, and being able to reflect on it, are prerequisites to developing increasingly flexible language use, and that is prerequisite to a huge range of cultural attainments.

You’ll notice also that incongruity is central to a wide array of forms of humor.

The ability to deal easily and pleasurably with incongruity contributes to flexibility of mind. Flexibility of mind is an important component of an educated person.

Humor is important for many things, not least the delight it can give to experience, but it has a distinctive educational importance in its contribution to flexible, imaginative, and creative thinking.

A Sense of Mystery An attraction to mystery is another cognitive tool we see evident in young children.

A strange task we have engaged with since we developed oral language involves our © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

132 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson struggle to find ways of capturing and expressing in symbols whatever we discover about the world and experience. Our store of knowledge is pitifully small—however fast it may seem to be accumulating. One problem with much early schooling at the moment is that the world is presented to children as a kind of vast encyclopedia, of which they are learning the first elementary bits. In the classroom, the child is situated as a novice being gradually inducted into our vast realm of knowledge.

And, of course, this in part captures what early schooling is about. But Social Studies, and later history, geography, and global issues, are represented as accumulations of facts, events, and ideas contained in textbooks, and the set of textbooks line up one after the other through to the final years of schooling. The world, in short, is presented to the student as known, and, for the most part, as not wonderful. Where the wonders of the content should live energetically and fruitfully in students’ minds these are, for nearly all students today, rather less than imaginatively engaging.

Isaac Newton in his later years, praised by his nephew for the numerous and wonderful scientific and mathematical achievements that had won him great fame, replied famously that he should rather be seen as like a boy on a sea-shore diverted by a prettier stone or shell, while before him the great ocean of knowledge lay unnoticed. This image suggests how tiny and inconsequential is what we know compared to what is to be known. Not foolishly, we congratulate ourselves as a species for bringing more and more knowledge into the bright circle of our recognition. But we too rarely attend to how vast and mysterious is the unknown that extends perhaps infinitely beyond that small circle. We are surrounded by mysteries and puzzles. But all that we know is so fragmentary and insecure that an important part of education is to introduce children to the mystery that surrounds our knowledge even as we introduce them to the knowledge. The point is not to suggest we induce stupor in children’s minds about how pathetically little they can learn, and so encourage them not to bother, but rather to show them how precious and how wonderful is the knowledge that we have, with mysterious ingenuity, carved out of the unknown. What a strange adventure!—is the attitude that needs to be taught to children who are embarking on it.

There are a number of other such tools the can help us describe the young child’s imaginative world. The ones we have sketched above should be sufficient for present purposes, however. Others can be seen, along with those above, described in more detail at: http://www.ierg.net/about/cogtools.html.

The Tools at Work Let’s work through an example of material commonly taught in a primary Social Studies program from an imaginative stance. You will see that applying the ‘imagination’s toolkit’ to the topic of Mapping entails a different approach to planning and teaching from what is common.

If we take the topic of Mapping and apply to it the above principles, what effect might they have on how we might teach it? Well, let’s begin by thinking about what the story on Mapping is and how we can bring out the emotional importance of © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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making maps. The first maps were of Sumarian cities. These cities grew fast: huge ziggurats, central squares, and then endless warrens of passages among small huts.

Uruk by around 2700 BCE had a population of approximately 80,000. Most people might know their local area and shops and the central square and be able to see the ziggurat towering in the centre, but who knew their way through the whole city, except perhaps some kids? Likely no one else. What if there had been some terrible crime? Who could find the way to the criminal’s house? Who knew how many people there were in the city, and how to tax them or arrange to feed them? And how would the king know who lived where in his city? The teacher might ask the students to consider how they might answer these questions, if placed into a small dwelling in a crowded passageway of Uruk nearly five thousand years ago. Well, the answer was to draw a map—the first map. This meant representing on a flat parchment the features and streets and passageways and dwellings of the city. Then anyone would be able to find his or her way to anywhere. Within a couple of centuries the Babylonian cities created maps in baked clay that also showed fields, rivers, roads, and outlying villages.

If you wanted to trade with other cities, and set out with your precious trade goods, how would you find the other cities before there were maps? Your uncle or some other traders could tell you the way, saying that you walk two days that way till you came to the river, then turn and at the hills make your way ... . But such directions were always liable to be misinterpreted. What if you walked faster or slower than those who gave the directions and perhaps the river dried up in the summers, or another river formed in the spring? Ask the students to imagine setting out with camels and partners and precious trade goods to find a distant city without a map and with only a set of imprecise instructions. People did get lost, caravan trains disappeared, whole armies were swallowed up in the vast spaces of western Asia.

One can dramatize the problem created when huge new cities and trading between them developed. We will want to include in our narrative the features of maps that improve their utility. Ask the students to consider what features they would want on their map to make it more useful to them as they set out upon their camel adventures. Students may suggest the value of scale. One certainly wants to know what a thumb’s width corresponds to on the actual earth—is one looking at a map of a small community or the South American continent? Should one go on foot or take the camel? Another important feature on a map is, of course, the orientation. Would one want to mark the happiest places and the saddest, or the safest and scariest, indicating why they may have those associations?

The importance of the map can be made clear in such dramatized narratives. The above narratives are built on the binaries of orientation/lack of orientation, which one could also represent with some emotional content as lost/secure. Mapping is seen then not just as a simple utility, but always as a way of increasing our security in the world, and helping us not to become lost. The practical value of this ancient invention is the same for us, traveling to a house in our town, as it was to the ancient Babylonians setting out with their camels loaded with cloth and metal tools on an uncertain route towards a distant city which was rich in spices. One would © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

134 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson then deal with all the usual content studied in learning about maps, but within a magical context in which the wonder of maps is brought to the fore.

The Imagination and Its Intermediate Years Tools A Sense of Reality In the process of becoming fluently literate students pick up a new toolkit to add to and interact with those tools they have already learned in their early years. The first cognitive tool we can see influencing students’ thinking after around Grade 4 is a new sense of reality. But clearly before they become literate most children distinguish between their fantasy worlds and reality (and equally clearly many adult politicians don’t). What is ‘new’ about the post-literate sense of reality? Well, perhaps we can see it most clearly in the kinds of stories children enjoy pre- and post-literacy. At age four or five, magic is acceptable if it carries the plot forward; witches, dragons, talking middle-class bears and rabbits in peculiar non-places and non-times are staples of early childhood literature. The characters of such stories are not ‘human’ (even when animals) so much as embodiments of single qualities such as goodness, wickedness, greed, kindness, etc. At age nine or ten, children may still enjoy fantasy stories but they have to be given a rational, even if implausible, explanation for the fantasy features—such a Superman’s powers or the Hulk’s strength. Giants who manage to live on the top of clouds, or fairy-godmothers, are not put to the same reality tests as the ten-year-olds’ superheroes. Relatedly, the characters in post-literate stories, however simple they may be, have become recognizably human. Think of the difference between the rabbit characters and behavior of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Hazel and Bigwig in Richard Adam’s Watership Down.

This is just one small index of a fundamental shift in the way literate minds are inclined to make different sense of the world and of their experience. More generally, literacy led, in our cultural history, to a sense of an ‘objective’ reality, which exists according to its own rules and laws that are quite independent from and immune to our hopes, fears, and wishes. It can lead each student to this same recognition.

Extremes of Reality and Limits of Experience With the recognition of this new sense of reality, the mind is inclined to discover reality’s extent, its limits, and its most salient features. So, too, students who are becoming increasingly fluent in reading and writing and begin to learn about the world around them, seek information about how extensive reality is, what are its limits, and what is most dramatic and wonderful about it. One of the stranger bits of dogma to have infected teacher education programs is that students are best or only able to deal with their immediate environments and experience and so any attempt to teach them about more distant knowledge must always start from what they are familiar with. But ten and eleven year olds girls we know are most interested in spies, vampire-slayers, and seriously weird pop stars, and the boys are into © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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superheroes, supernaturally inarticulate sports stars, and creatures from outerspace, and both really want to know who had the longest finger-nails ever, what is the longest worm, and that for every human being on the planet there are 200,000,000 insects, give or take, and about twenty-six billion insects per square mile. Extreme sizes of body parts is also a big interest generator.

If you want to discover the extent and wonders of reality, it is a bizarrely inappropriate strategy to keep focusing on the here and now everyday life of students.

Yet this has become one of the dogmas taught to every pre-service teacher in the Western world. As a direct consequence, typical students find Social Studies and most of what they do in school, and school itself, commonly boring. Now, we shouldn’t overdo this, as is too easy. Many teachers do indeed make Social Studies exciting to students, or, rather, they bring out what is truly exciting about social studies topics so that students can experience them. And many students find school really interesting, even despite—they most commonly add—what they are supposed to do in classes.

Might this principle—to approach teaching about the real world through its most extreme, exotic, and wonderful features—threaten to confuse education with entertaining? Well, we suppose it’s the more glitzy, superficial, sensational, trivial-spectacle, learning-empty sense of entertainment that is meant in the objection. But we are not sure we will want to dismiss even some of these features of entertainment. The ‘romantic’ attitude is one in which everything is in some way wonderful. Take, for example, the wonderful nature of a textbook. In the classroom the power of the text or a book in general to shape, disseminate and preserve knowledge is stunning.

The creation of the printing press back in the 15th century had a phenomenal effect on European culture. Students may not generally look upon a textbook/book in this way but could be encouraged to do so. They may research the extremes and limits of the book. What was the longest book ever written? The shortest? The heaviest?

The lightest? What and where is the oldest book? Is a book still a book when it is electronic? Thus, the problem for the teacher is to understand what engages the imagination of the newly literate mind and present knowledge in a form that is readily accessible. This isn’t pandering to appetites for sensationalism; it’s a simple matter of common sense and courtesy. Teachers can benefit as much as the students by allowing the imagination a more central role in the classroom. By teaching in ways that engage students’ imaginatively in learning, the teacher creates a context in which teaching is more effective and rewarding.

Even if it is true that students’ fascination with reality comes alive, particularly when they learn about its extremes and limits, and its exotic or wonderful features, some educators clearly think this is regrettable if not extraneous to what needs to be ‘covered’ in the classroom. We have attempted to show that imagination is not a distraction from learning, that it should not be ignored or suppressed but is, rather at the heart of all education. Paradoxically, it is by focusing on the limits and extremes of reality that one builds the context within which the ‘relevant’ can become meaningful. This is, after all, the kind of strategy you would use if you found yourself in a strange environment. You would explore the limits of the town, its main features, where the river goes through it, where the central square is, what © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

136 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson are the rituals and ceremonies of the natives, what kind of unusual clothes they wear, and so on.

Associating with the Heroic What other cognitive tools develop to enable students’ imaginations to grasp reality?

Well, try to recall what it was like when you were eleven and trying to deal with the small or great anxieties created by trying to make sense of, and fit into, a real world that was not always hospitable. (A. E. Housman’s line: ‘I, a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made’, resonates very powerfully in early adolescence.)

One strategy nearly all students use is to ‘romantically’ associate with whomever or whatever seems best able to overcome the threats that hem them in. That is, they associate with heroes. Heroes are the people, or institutions, or whatever, that adolescents see as able to overcome the constraints that they feel hemmed in by.

So the sports star or pop singer, or historical character, or family member can become a hero to a boy or girl. Having a hero is not a passive condition. The student—or you and we—vicariously partake in the hero’s transgression of the boundaries that we cannot or do not cross. The sports or pop stars do not have to fret that they don’t have enough money for the latest portable music player; they don’t have to take the bus home; they don’t have to wear what their mother tells them (one assumes!); they don’t seem to feel as though they are ‘strangers and afraid’ because they have the power the students, and you and we, lack to remake our reality closer to our heart’s desire.

And the educational point? All curriculum areas are crammed with heroes, so thickly there’s barely room to stand up. The student lacks the ingenuity to work out what earthly use is the knowledge that alternate interior angles are congruent: Let me introduce you to the heroic Eratosthenes of Alexandria. They wouldn’t know how to build railroads across rivers, under rivers, through miles of rock: Let me introduce you to Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The ‘romantic’ perspective on reality is thronged with people, or, rather, with people who embody human emotions and extreme and exotic and wonderful characteristics—like courage, loyalty, compassion, ingenuity, envy, treachery, greed, and so on. The student doesn’t so much associate with the hero, with the pop or the sports star; they associate with the transcendent human qualities they embody. So the educational trick is to show knowledge as a product of some person’s ‘transcendent human qualities’—i.e. someone’s extraordinary ingenuity, courage, treachery, compassion, and so on.

The Social Studies contains many a hero and heroic, transcendent quality too in the geography portion of the curriculum. The planet Earth and its processes and mind-boggling complexity is thronged with heroes with whom the student may associate. These may be the people who discovered the knowledge we are to learn, and the hopes, fears, and passions that surrounded their discovery, or they may be embedded in the content itself. Take, for example, the destructive force of an earthquake or the quiet strength of lichen growing on the sheer rock faces of our highest mountains. Consider the persistence of the weeds that always seem to overtake our manicured gardens or the unstoppable nature of a flooding river. © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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Nature can be seen through transcendent human qualities to make it engaging and meaningful in our Social Studies teaching.

Everything in the curriculum can be shown in such a light. At present, most textbooks are not crammed with heroes. You would never guess that all that knowledge in math and science textbooks was a product of people’s passions, courage, deviousness, hopes, and fears. If we want that knowledge to engage the imaginations of early adolescents we need to show it in terms of people’s passions, courage, and so on. It isn’t very difficult to do this. Indeed, it is more enjoyable and meaningful for teachers and students alike, but we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed. The result is commonly sterility in the knowledge presented and boredom in those to whom it is presented, and, often enough, in the teachers who are doing the presenting. It need not be so.

The Sense of Wonder The sense of mystery in the pre-literate period becomes transmuted by literacy and its concern with reality into a sense of wonder. This sense of wonder can be stimulated and developed into a key tool of inquiry. All inquiry begins with the feeling we put into words as ‘I wonder ...’ During the half-dozen or so years during which the cognitive tools of literacy are gaining an increasing hold over the brain’s functioning and enhancing the mind, the sense of wonder constantly serves to keep the world and experience interesting. It is the great enemy of taking things for granted. In the classroom it can be used to bring out what is wonderful by focusing students’ attention on unexpected dimensions of reality and the human qualities connected with anything.

Consider the paper you are looking at, and which is messed up by the inky squiggles that constitute these words. Feel how smooth the paper is, of an astonishing uniform white, how thin the page is, and how easily you can turn one sheet over to read what is on its back. What astonishing ingenuity has gone into creating such an object; the hundreds of sheets stacked so precisely together. The more you know about the history of paper-making, and of the people who made the various inventions that have culminated in this wonderful product, the easier it is to make that wonder vivid for students—and the more they learn about the chemical and physical inventions and processes, and of the people who made them, the longer that wonder will last, be passed on to others, and daily add in perhaps a small way to their delight every time they see a book. It is a technique for making our lives more rich and abundant with endless small delights.

The students’ sense of wonder is easily evoked in relation to geographic topics in the Social Studies curriculum. Consider, for example, the marvels of the planet earth. One can marvel at the exquisitely intricate patterns of a leaf or the unthinkable complexity with which the earth’s systems work together in an environment hospitable to human life.

It would be easy to rattle on at even greater length identifying further cognitive tools of literacy, but let the above set of characteristics suffice to indicate how thinking about education in these terms leads to rather different principles from those that dominate schooling today. © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

138 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson The Tools at Work Let’s take a closer look at what the imaginative classroom might look like at the Romantic stage of understanding. In middle school or high school students will likely be learning about Revolutions as part of the Social Studies curriculum. The example that follows explores how one might teach students about the French Revolution in a way that incorporates the tools of imaginative engagement discussed in the previous section.

At the Romantic stage of understanding we have noted the importance of identifying and shaping our teaching around the heroic qualities in a topic. So what heroic human qualities can be seen and felt as central to the topic of the French Revolution? What emotional images does the French Revolution evoke? At this stage it is essential that teachers first identify what is most emotionally engaging for themselves in the topic. One emotionally charged aspect of a cultural revolution is the courage and associated sacrifice demonstrated by people living in revolutionary times. It is because of the courage and strength of people who participate in and endure revolutions that we have the rights and privileges that we do today. In our investigation of courage we will want to study the peasants whose passionate cries for equality, or at least relief from despotic tyranny, fueled the fire of revolution, as well as the courage of many aristocrats who were, by the cartload, taken to the guillotine. What were the particular hopes and fears of these people? To shape the content of the unit into a narrative form one could study the various ‘faces’ of the revolution. This approach would bring into focus the stories of the peasant men, women and children, nobles, and government officials who demonstrated courage and experienced great sacrifice during the upheaval.

Shaping the content of the unit into a narrative will help imaginatively engage students in learning. Our initial access to the story of France in the late 18th century could be a story of extremes—of unfathomable opulence within the ornate walls of Versailles in contrast to privation and suffering in the French countryside, where peasants struggled under the weight of heavy taxes, poor crops, and stifling inflation. We could help students create a mental image of the excesses of the First Estate by describing the rich silk clothing, elaborate wigs and fantasy-like life within the walls of King Louis XV’s palace at Versailles and juxtaposing this with the reality of France beyond the royal lands: a country crippled by debt and simmering with dissent among the third classes. We could add to this image a description of the Louis XV’s office with its ornate walls, elaborately trimmed windows, and unimaginably expensive furnishings. We could develop students’ mental images further by describing a desk with the usual books, papers etc. but also a small, miniature guillotine for clipping the king’s imported cigars.

Now that students have begun to develop a mental image of the gross inequity of French society, we could shape the unit around the stories of people in the Revolution—both rich and poor—that exemplify the gulf between the First and Third estates and the injustices experienced by members of the Third Estate. We could tell our students, for example, about the aristocrat who, upon returning to his chateau following some hunting, noticed workers fixing the roof. The aristocrat wanted to see how someone might actually fall from the roof and so he took aim and shot one of the men. The poor man fell to his death. Many people were © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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horrified by his actions, but the aristocrat couldn’t see why. As far as the aristocrat was concerned, the man was only a peasant. When the incident went to trial, the king waived the charges laid against the aristocrat, but added that it would be only fair if some peasant shot him in return. This anecdote is an effective way to illustrate the mind-set of the aristocrat and of the king in regards to the peasants. One could also tell a short anecdote about the storming of the Bastille from the perspective of one of the riotous peasants. Famished, broke, unable to provide for his family, and unable to accept the injustices of the government any longer, a young man joins a crowd heading to Bastille with the intention to release the prisoners rumored to be unjustly held inside. The group’s size increases as they march through the streets of Paris toward the infamous prison: a looming fortress that, for many, symbolized the power of the ancient regime. They forced their way in, released a mere seven prisoners and killed the soldiers they met in the process. With the heads of the decapitated warden and guards on forks they celebrated their victory. What this brief narrative sketch illustrates is the rising tide of the revolt and the start of the Revolution.

As we continue to organize the content into a narrative structure we could identify some central events of the revolution that could either be investigated as a class or assigned to students to research individually. These include: the meeting of the Estates at Versailles, the tennis court oath, the women’s march to Versailles, the Great Fear etc. At each of these stages in the evolving story of the revolution we will want to look for the ‘face’—a key person and his/her experiences—of that stage and what their story was, and how they exemplify courage. The students should seek, too, the extremes of their topic. So, for example, in studying the bloodiest stage of the revolution, the Terror, students could find out, how many people died, how many died per day, how many guillotines needed to be used, how many heads had to be severed before a blade needed sharpening.

In terms of conclusion, how could we best bring the topic to satisfactory closure, while pointing on to further dimensions or to other topics? We have chosen, for this example, to focus on courage as a theme that brings ‘faces’ and individual people into focus, bringing meaning to the events. What happened to all that courage?

What did it result in? The personalized and humanized view we have taken might lead easily to students role-playing or creating a documentary to reinforce their emotional engagement with the themes of courage and sacrifice around which we have framed our teaching. Following these performances students could spend some time reflecting on the conflict in the revolution; the significance, for example, of the great injustices that occurred in the name of justice or how human courage contributes to change. While one could use a traditional type of evaluation instrument to assess student learning, the projects described above in combination with a reflective type of activity would also provide excellent insight into their comprehension of key events and their imaginative engagement in the process.

Conclusion It would be better had we a lot more space for elaborating the examples, to try to indicate better how the cognitive tools can bring imaginative and emotional © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

140 Kieran Egan & Gillian Judson engagement to any lesson. We should, of course, also acknowledge that teachers constantly use these kinds of tools in their teaching. Our aim is only to make explicit a set of the ‘tools’ that engage students’ imaginations and explore how they might more routinely be used in teaching. For a further set of cognitive tools one might use to engage students’ imaginations in learning social studies content as well as for access to planning frameworks that can make the process of moving from the tools to everyday practice easier, see http://www.ierg.net or Egan (2005).

While, of course, many teachers have used stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery, a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic in their teaching, what is less common is wielding these and other related cognitive tools into strategies for routinely engaging students’ imaginations in learning social studies content. Our aim is to emphasize that the imagination is not some kind of frill we should attend to only on the periphery of our teaching, but is rather the basic work-horse of learning, which should be at the center of our thinking about how to plan and teach social studies content.

References Barrow, R. (1988) Some Observations on the Concept of Imagination, in: K. Egan & D. Nadaner (eds), Imagination and Education (New York, Teachers College Press), pp. 79–90.

Bettelheim, B. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment (New York, Knopf ).

Egan, K. (2005) An Imaginative Approach to Teaching (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass).

Kearney, R. (1988) The Wake of Imagination (London, Hutchinson).

Warnock, M. (1976) Imagination (London, Faber).

White, A. R. (1990) The Language of Imagination (Oxford, Blackwell).

© 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia