This is the heart of Corbett Charter School. It is the unique understanding of teaching and learning that has convinced me that we still have room to dramatically improve education in Corbett.
It's a catchy phrase, which is both necessary (if you want to get the attention of the education community) and unfortunate. It is unfortunate in that it is tempting to substitute the everyday-and-widely-varying notions of 'imaginative' for the specific phenomena (yes, plural, but limited) that Kieran Egan had in mind when he coined the phrase.
Kieran Egan's writing and research in Imaginative Education spans several decades, and his Imaginative Education Research Group based at Simon Fraser University is the world-wide clearing house for research, publishing and training in his unique approach. One of his books, The Educated Mind, is the single most comprehensive treatment of his ideas. I highly recommend it to those who are curious to understand our excitement and the basis for our ambitious goals.
As an approach to education in general, Imaginative Education consists in a highly sophisticated philosophical/anthropological approach to an array of issues ranging from human development to the nature of culture, cognition, childhood, knowledge and the world itself. When it comes to the relationship between theory and practice, most educators are pleased that they are not required to master the entirety of the related literature in order to put certain key insights to work. This may sound startling until one stops to consider how few educators (or others) have read Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Skinner, Kant, Locke, Piaget, Dewey, Montessori, Adler, Greene, or any dozen or so other seminal thinkers upon whose work most educational practice is (at least loosely) based. Egan is not easy. He is worth the effort. And I feel very fortunate to work with a team that is intent on fully understanding his ideas.
As an approach to teaching, the core insight of Imaginative Education is this: Human beings have an affinity for knowing. We find learning fun and interesting. So the first question that a teacher should ask herself when preparing a lesson is this: What is it about this topic that captures my imagination, my emotional commitment? This might seem like common sense (after one reads it) but it is not how we are taught to teach in schools of education. Most of us have been taught numerous ways to construct and deliver lessons, and never does the conversation begin with 'What is it that is the most emotionally engaging about this topic?' Someone said (was it Bertrand Russell?) that there is nothing so uncommon as 'common sense'. Next, the question of what it is that a teacher finds emotionally engaging in a topic needs to be translated to the emotional landscape and previous knowledge of the students in the room, which is why our multiage classrooms are configured as they are. Our classrooms, as they are designed, correspond to what Egan identifies as the age ranges of Mythic (based in oral language), Romantic (based in literacy) and Philosophic (based on the ability to think systematically) understandings. So the same topic, which is emotionally engaging to the same teacher for the same reasons, may be presented very differently to a given class depending on the current levels of understanding and interests of the students in the room.
(At this point some education 'insiders' will be tempted to think that this is the same thing as other more familiar, developmental theories. So to those 'insiders', I can only urge you to read the book cited above. It is profoundly different that anything proposed by Piaget or Erikson and is not driven by a model of biological/cognitive development.)
There is much more to add, but that's a start...Imaginative Education. Check it out at www.ierg.net The page includes pictures and text from our last IE training in Corbett!
