Inclusion through Imagination

Making sense of the B.C. curriculum involves coming to imagine the world, and one’s place in it, in particular ways.

If these are presented as the only ways of seeing the world – as simply being “the way the world is” – and if there is little connection between this perspective and the lived world of the child, the curriculum may simply appear bewildering, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless.

Imaginative education seeks to establish deep emotional connections between the child and the curriculum; to enable this, the curriculum itself must come to be seen as the product of the same human hopes and fears, dreams and struggles that are familiar to the child from their earliest years.

In this case, the children’s lives and communities become part of the curriculum too, because of the tools they provide for making sense of it: tools that children acquire in the process of learning a language, learning to play together, learning the stories and images of their culture and place.

Because imaginative education seeks to develop and enrich these tools, it is a potentially effective means of cultural inclusion.