Publisher: Sense Publishers
Format: Soft cover
Introduction by Kieran Egan
This book offers a detailed examination of imagination in learning. Teachers working with the ideas of Imaginative Education in their classrooms provide examples that cover multiple curricular areas and span elementary through secondary contexts.
“Imagination” has moved in recent years from being considered some kind of educational frill to a recognized main workhorse of teaching and learning. It is this new perspective that this book celebrates and exemplifies. The book is divided between teachers’ and researchers’ voices, both exploring a range of ways in which the imagination can be used in everyday classrooms to enhance learning and increase the satisfactions of teaching. This book demonstrates how engaging the imagination lies at the core of effective education.
Publisher: Jossy-Bass Format: Hard cover
How can we best help children through each stage of that long educational journey from pre-literate kindergarten to complex abstract thinking in high school? In this book, award-winning educator Kieran Egan shows how we can transform the experience of K-12 students and help them become more knowledgeable and more creative in their thinking. At the core of this transformative process is imagination--which can become the heart of effective learning if it is tied to education’s central tasks.
An Imaginative Approach to Teaching is a groundbreaking book that offers an understanding of how students’ imaginations work in learning and shows how the acquisition of cognitive tools drives students’ educational development. This approach is unique in that it engages both the imagination and emotions. The author clearly demonstrates how knowledge comes to life in students’ minds if it is introduced in the context of human hopes, fears, and passions. To facilitate this new educational approach, the book includes a wide variety of effective teaching tools--such as story, rhythm, play, opposition, agency, and meta-narrative understanding--that value and build upon the way children understand their experiences. Most important, Egan provides frameworks for lesson planning and more than a dozen sample lessons to show how teachers can use these tools to awaken intelligence and imagination in the classroom.
Teachers, teacher educators, and staff development professionals will find this book to be an invaluable resource for understanding the theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies for effectively engaging students' imaginations.
"As we come to expect from Kieran Egan, this book is imaginative, engaging, wise, and practical. A terrific resource for teachers at every level." - Nel Noddings, author, Happiness and Education and Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita, Stanford University. (Book cover.)
“With An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, Egan provides educators with new ways to promote creativity in the classroom. This book is an essential resource for all educators.” - Maren Roedenbeck. Childhood Education, Spring, 2006.
"Kieran Egan’s work on imagination and learning has addressed our needs as teachers to foster more creative thinking within our classrooms. Tapping into this creative energy has added a whole new level of fascination, not to mention fulfillment, to our ‘middle years’ teaching. We encourage all educators to use the book to put this unbelievable theory into practice in the near future!” - Anne-Marie Dooner, Peter Obendoerfer, Nicole Marie Kerbrat, and Principal Verland Hicks, middle school educators, Ecole Leila North Community School, Winnipeg, Manitoba. (Book cover.)
Publisher: University of Chicago press Format: Soft cover
The Educated Mind offers a bold and revitalizing new vision for today's uncertain educational system. Kieran Egan reconceives education, taking into account how we learn. He proposes the use of particular "intellectual tools"—such as language or literacy—that shape how we make sense of the world. These mediating tools generate successive kinds of understanding: somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophical, and ironic. Egan's account concludes with practical proposals for how teaching and curriculum can be changed to reflect the way children learn.
"Kieran Egan has one of the most original, penetrating, and capacious minds in education today. This book provides the best introduction to his important body of work." Howard Gardner, author of Frames of Mind, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, etc. Book cover, hardback.
"A carefully argued and readable book. . . . Egan proposes a radical change of approach for the whole process of education. . . . There is much in this book to interest and excite those who discuss, research or deliver education." - - - Ann Fullick, New Scientist.
"Almost anyone involved at any level or in any part of the education system will find this a fascinating book to read."--Dr. Richard Fox, British Journal of Educational Psychology.
"A new theory of education that is (believe it or not) useful. . . . . 'The Educated Mind' is something very new and different." C.J. Driver. The New York Times Book Review.
"This is really a very exciting book . . . Readers who feel jaded by the output of recent educational thinkers will be refreshed by this book." Oliver Leaman, The Lecturer.
Publisher: Teachers College Press Format: Soft cover
Everyone knows that educational success is much more likely when students’ imaginations and emotions are caught up in learning. While we have a rich educational literature about holding students’ interest, we do not have very much sustained work on what the imagination is, how it works in learning, or how it may be inspired in the classroom. Addressing the whole curriculum, this book provides insights into each of those areas central to educational success.
Engaging the imagination is sometimes seen in opposition to preparing students for testing, but scoring well on tests and being imaginatively active in learning are not mutually exclusive. When students’ imaginations are engaged in learning their educational performance will improve by any test or measure. This book offers a new understanding of how knowledge grows in the mind and how our imagination works and changes during our lifetime. Knowledgeable authors describe innovative teaching methods based on these insights, which offer new ways of planning and teaching.
"Lively and provocative . . . . I am convinced that the imagination-based approach to education that is addressed in this collection could have a crucial and lasting impact on the way we learn." Max Wyman, OC, D. Litt (hon), Cultural critic, policy advisor, and author of The Definant Imagination.
Publisher: Corwin Press Format: Soft cover
USA Book News "Best Books 2006" Award finalist.
2006 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award Finalist
For teachers charged with the great responsibility of helping students achieve basic literacy, delivering instruction in stimulating and engaging ways is not an ideal-it’s a necessity. Recognizing this, award-winning author and educator Kieran Egan puts the fun in fundamentals of literacy by helping teachers stir students’ imagination and emotions.
In Teaching Literacy, Egan rejects the notion that familiar ideas and experiences are the best vehicles for effective instruction. Instead, he champions a new approach that focuses on teaching core literacy skills using concepts ranging from fascinating to exotic to magnificent to weird. By framing the elements of literacy in the unforgettable, students more readily internalize and retain material, not only preparing them for tests, but also instilling a lifelong love of reading and writing.
"A fascinating piece of writing, presenting ideas that are fresh and exciting." -Taddie Kelly, Literacy Coach and Reading Interventionist Waco Independent School District, TX.
"Focuses on enhancing students' metalinguistic awareness and not just their intuitive use of words, fostering the development of higher mental functions." -Elena Bodrova, Senior Researcher, McREL
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press Format: Soft cover
An eminently practical guide, Teaching as Story Telling shows teachers how to integrate imagination and reason into the curriculum when planning classes in social studies, language arts, mathematics, and science.
"Egan's book makes the reader look anew at what is too often taken for granted about the ways in which children learn . . . I am very impressed by the practicality of his introduction of the use of the story-forms in curriculum for young children. His model is fascinating, and its various possibilities in a range of fields makes it worth a good look by many kinds of teachers." -- Maxine Greene, Teachers' College, Columbia Univeristy.
"In his innovative book,Kieran Egan refashions the ancient function of the storyteller with such clarity that any new teacher can step into the role with confidence.” – Vivian Gussin Paley, Author and teacher.