Engaging Imagination

How to nurture creativity in tomorrow’s innovators—today’s college students When asked what they want colleges to emphasize most, employers didn’t put science, computing, math, or business management first. According to AAC&U’s 2013 employer survey, 95% of employers give hiring preference to college graduates with skills that will enable them to contribute to innovation in the workplace. In Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers, two leading educators help college instructors across disciplines engage students in nurturing creativity and innovation for success beyond the classroom. Alison James, an expert in creative arts education, and Stephen D. Brookfield, bestselling author, outline how creative exploration can extend students’ reflective capabilities in a purposeful way, help them understand their own potential and learning more clearly, and imbue students with the freedom to generate and explore new questions. This book: shows why building creative skills pays dividends in the classroom and in students’ professional lives long after graduation; offers research-based, classroom-tested approaches to cultivating creativity and innovation in the college setting; provides practical tools for incorporating “play” into the college curriculum; draws on recent advances in the corporate sector where creative approaches have been adopted to reinvigorate thinking and problem-solving processes; and includes examples from a variety of disciplines and settings. Engaging Imagination is for college and university faculty who need to prepare students for the real challenges of tomorrow’s workplace.

How to nurture creativity in tomorrow’s innovators—today’s college students When asked what they want colleges to emphasize most, employers didn’t put science, computing, math, or business management first. According to AAC&U’s 2013 employer survey, 95% of employers give hiring preference to college graduates with skills that will enable them to contribute to innovation in the workplace. In Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers, two leading educators help college instructors across disciplines engage students in nurturing creativity and innovation for success beyond the classroom. Alison James, an expert in creative arts education, and Stephen D. Brookfield, bestselling author, outline how creative exploration can extend students’ reflective capabilities in a purposeful way, help them understand their own potential and learning more clearly, and imbue students with the freedom to generate and explore new questions. This book: shows why building creative skills pays dividends in the classroom and in students’ professional lives long after graduation; offers research-based, classroom-tested approaches to cultivating creativity and innovation in the college setting; provides practical tools for incorporating “play” into the college curriculum; draws on recent advances in the corporate sector where creative approaches have been adopted to reinvigorate thinking and problem-solving processes; and includes examples from a variety of disciplines and settings. Engaging Imagination is for college and university faculty who need to prepare students for the real challenges of tomorrow’s workplace.

Imagination is the Source of Creativity and Invention This series of essays has been collected expressly to bring readers new ideas about imagination and creativity in education that will both stimulate discussion and debate and also contribute practical ideas for how to infuse our daily classrooms with imaginative activities. In a world that values creative innovation, it is distressing that our schools are dominated by an educational paradigm that pays too little attention to engaging the imagination and emotions of students in the curriculum and the worlds challenges that the curriculum is designed to prepare students to meet. The ability of children to think creatively, to be innovative, enterprising, and capable, depends greatly on providing a rich imagination-based educational environment. It is only when we consider the imagination a vital component of our lives and one of the great workhorses of learning that we recognize the importance of adding the imaginative to the study of the affective, cognitive, and physical modes of our development. Doing so fills a gap that has led to incomplete accounts of childrens development, their subsequent learning needs, and indeed, how to fulfill these needs in educational environments. This discussion, about the importance of imagination and creativity in education, has been taken up by researchers and educators around the world. It is represented here by writings from authors from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Romania. In the first part of this book these authors explore and discuss theories of development, imagination, and creativity. In the second part they extend these theories to broader social issues such as responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, to new approaches to curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, and to the educational environment of the museum.

Imagination is the source of creativity and invention. This volume of essays has been collected expressly to bring readers new ideas about imagination and creativity in education that will both stimulate discussion and debate, and also contribute practical ideas for how to infuse daily classrooms with imaginative activities. Researchers and educators around the world have taken up the discussion about the importance of imagination and creativity in education. This global relevance is represented here by writings from authors from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Romania. In the first part of the book, these authors explore and discuss theories of development, imagination, and creativity. In the second part, they extend these theories to broader social issues, including responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, and to new approaches to teaching curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, as well as to the educational environment of the museum. Since the first edition of this book, Imaginative Education (IE) has developed increasingly accessible strategies for teachers to routinely engage imagination in everyday practice. New essays for the second edition include discussions about increasing political consciousness, improving teacher education, and using mathematical evaluation in Part I, and phenomenological approaches to media education in Part II.

This book illustrates how to connect students to the natural world and encourage them to care about a more sustainable, ecologically secure planet.

We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to decreased productivity and cooperation, or worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma.The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—it can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, or tasty meals. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious. We can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.

Students’ imaginations are often considered as something that might be engaged after the hard work of learning has been done. Countering such beliefs, Egan and Judson show that the imagination—one of the great workhorses of learning—can be used to make all learning and all teaching more effective. Through techniques that any teacher can learn and easily apply in any classroom, they demonstrate how and why imagination can be used across the curriculum and grade levels to make teaching and learning more interesting, engaging, and pleasurable for all. Teachers who use these techniques will discover the emotions, images, stories, metaphors, sense of wonder, heroic narratives, and other cognitive tools that can bring life and energy to their classroom. This practical handbook will help teachers learn how to use these enlivening techniques in their daily practice to stimulate students’ intellectual activity and growth. Book Features: A comprehensive description of imagination’s role in thinking and learning. Field-tested teaching strategies for the K–12 classroom. Cross-curricular examples showing IE making a real difference for teachers and students. A “cognitive toolkit” to spur active learning and meaningful interaction. “What fun! Readers will get a host of practical ideas to make lessons come alive through the exercise of imagination, the use of metaphors, and the telling of stories. Read and enjoy.” —Nel Noddings, Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita, Stanford University

This unique approach to teaching core literacy skills offers step-by-step planning frameworks and an appendix of activity ideas to show teachers how to engage students in the process.