This website describes and gives many examples of a new approach to teaching literacy. What is new about this approach is tied up with the ways it uses feelings and images, metaphors and jokes, rhyme and rhythm, stories and wonder, heroes and the exotic, hopes, fears, and passions, hobbies and collecting, and much else in engaging the imaginations of both teachers and learners with literacy. That is, it isn’t just that we use such tools for teaching and learning literacy, but we do so in a new and systematic way.

Literacy is one of the great workhorses of our culture, society, and economy. It can greatly enrich the lives of those who learn to use it well. This approach shows how we might better teach our students to learn to use this great cultural toolkit for their benefit and pleasure. This website is designed mainly for teachers and parents.

This new approach is distinguished by its engaging the imaginations and emotions of learners, and also of teachers, in developing literacy. It draws on three sources:

Vygotsky’s ideas about the imagination and his developmental ideas

Practices derived from a study of oral cultures

The systematic study of imagination by the Imaginative Education Research Group

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