Engaging children’s imagination and emotions

in learning

Conference on

Imagination, Spirituality and Creativity in Early Childhood Education: The Neglected

Side of the Curriculum

Efrata College of Education, Jerusalem, Sept. 15th. 2014

Kieran Egan

Simon Fraser University

Overview – Initial Questions

What is new about IE? a new understanding of how knowledge grows in the mind, and

how our imaginations work and change during our lives innovative teaching methods based on these insights offer new

ways of planning and teaching

So what is the imagination? ability to think of the possible, not just the actual source of invention, novelty, and flexibility in human thinking

that greatly enriches rational thinking tied to our ability to form images and our emotions

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Development of children’s minds

Knowledge accumulation

Psychological development

Cognitive tool acquisition

What are cognitive tools? 75,000 years ago to today.

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Kinds of Understanding IE is based on five distinctive kinds of understanding that

enable people to make sense of the world in different ways enable each student to develop these five kinds of understanding

while they are learning math, science, social studies, and all other subjects

needs to be accomplished in a certain order because each kind of understanding represents an increasingly complex way that we learn to use language

Somatic Understanding (pre-linguistic)

Mythic Understanding (oral language)

Romantic Understanding (written language)

Philosophic Understanding (theoretic use of language)

Ironic Understanding (reflexive use of language)

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Somatic Understanding

understand experience in a physical, pre-linguistic way

Somatic: the body’s toolkit

•Bodily senses

•Emotional responses & attachments

•Humor & expectations

•Musicality, rhythm, & pattern

•Gesture & communication

•Intentionality“little factories of understanding”Ted Hughes

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bodily senses Minds and bodies--rather than enminded body and

embodied mind. Mind spreads into senses Games that bring them together--plops, clicks and

touch Basis for further understanding--Einstein and light

waves; Taliban education minister.

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emotional responses & attachments

Orientors to knowledge throughout life Fundamental organizers of our

cognition Expectation and frustration, or

satisfaction “perfinkers” Setting us in a network of love & care

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humour & expectations

The smile appears at a uniform time in children everywhere, even deaf/blind

Peek-a-boo The unexpected and incongruous Affectionate communication nets

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musicality, pattern & rhythm Singing Neanderthals (Steven Mithen) Rhythm tracking Walking, marching, and dancing We are a musical animal Meaning in pattern

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gesture & communication & intentionality

Baby, cat, and door Novel combinations, from the beginning “interlock the infant’s growing mind with

those of its caretakers and ultimately the broader society” Merlin Donald (1991, p. 255)

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Mythic Understanding

understand experience through

oral language

Mythic cognitive tools: Story

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Mythic cognitive tools: abstraction and emotion

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Mythic cognitive tool: Opposites and Mediation

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Mythic cognitive tools: Images Teacher and Japanese garden

Image and concept in teaching

Image and emotion

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Mythic cognitive tools: Jokes and humor

When is a door not a door?

Observing language as an object, not just a behavior.

Vivifies thought and language, and, incidentally, gives pleasure to life.

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Mythic cognitive tools: Sense of mystery & wonder

Isaac Newton as an old man

Representing the world as known, and rather dull.

What a wonderful adventure!

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Mythic cognitive tools so far: Story Abstract and affective binary opposites Affective images Jokes and humor Mystery and wonder

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From cognitive tools to planning teaching

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Examples

Teaching place value

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Romantic Understanding

understand experience through

written language

Romantic cognitive tools: from oral to literate culture

Cinderella to Superman: Peter Rabbit to Hazel and Bigwig

‘win’ in ‘window’ : ‘at’ from ‘cat’ : stop and watch the stopwatch

White bears on Novaya Zemla; Blue shamrocks on Sirius 5.

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Romantic cognitive tools: Extremes and limits of reality

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Romantic cognitive tools: associating with the heroic

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Romantic cognitive tools: matters of detail

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Romantic cognitive tools: humanizing knowledge

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Examples

Teaching about eels

Teaching “interior opposite angles of a parallelogram are congruent”

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Conclusion

All knowledge is human knowledge; it grows out of human hopes, fears, and passions. Imaginative engagement with knowledge comes from learning in the context of the hopes, fears, and passions from which it has grown or in which it finds a living meaning.

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