PDF Pedagogies of the Imagination Download
- Author: John B. Porco
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- Languages : en
- Pages : 0
The increasingly complex ways that we make meaning have led to increasingly messy analyses of developing literacies in schools. Education researchers looking at literacy have traditionally centered their understanding of the practice of literacy and methods of research on cognitive or socio-cultural foundations. Often these frames are juxtaposed. Here, I center a playful notion of the imagination in understanding both how we think, learn, and develop literacies, as well as how we craft our research methodologies.Building on ideas found in the history of the philosophy of imagination, I conceive of our imagination as transactional between the known and unknown, or subjective and objective worlds. While we may only be able to know the imagination in part, it is important that we seek to better understand how the imagination serves as a motivating force to bring together assemblages of cognitive, perceptive, emotive, and socio-cultural metadata to form ideas, beliefs, judgements, feelings, and narratives. Grounded in this notion of the imagination, this research suggests a methodology for observing the imagination in classrooms, and ultimately a way of centering the imagination in the process of developing lesson plans and pedagogical practices. The resultant "pedagogies of the imagination" open up new ways of asking crucial questions in education and beyond: what is the role of emotions in learning; or how may we rethink poverty in terms of the imagination, i.e. a limiting of potentials as opposed to a lack of economic resources, and what are the implications for that in the classroom?