IERG on YouTube!

Among the products of the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG) in Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education is a set of unusual principles for teaching. The principles lead to a set of teaching practices that are also a bit unusual. They are designed to help teachers engage their students’ imaginations in learning. The IERG has mounted the first seven of a series of brief videos about these imaginative teaching practices on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/IERGvideo.

Each video is between about three and seven minutes long. The format is usually an opening interview with Dr. Kieran Egan who describes one of the principles and the “learning tool” that it leads to, he then gives an example or two of how it can be used in teaching, and finally a teacher describes how she or he has used it in teaching. Ph.D. students Kym Stewart and Gillian Judson and teachers Tannis Calder and Caitlyn James star in this first set of videos.

The topics of the videos so far mounted are about using humor for language development, binary opposites for initial grasp of content, story structuring lessons and units to make them emotionally meaningful, using the limits of experience and the extremes of reality, forming images in the mind, personalizing objects to make them meaningful to young students, and using heroes and heroic characteristics.

The purpose for mounting them on YouTube is to make them widely available to teachers who look to that source for ideas about their practice. Perhaps many people would be surprised how many educational videos are already on YouTube. We hope many teachers and others interested in education will take a look at our first set of descriptions of some of our ideas. The IERG plans to make more videos and also to include students as well as more elaborate demonstrations of our work. If you take at look at our first efforts we would value comments and suggestions: send to ierg-ed at sfu dot ca.