An Imaginative Approach To Teaching

by Kieran Egan

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.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching

251 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Kadri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kieran Egan argues that learning cannot truly happen without emotional engagement. In An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, he shows how imagination, stories, contrasts, and human drama can transform classroom topics from dry content into something students genuinely care about.

What resonated with me most was his idea that knowledge should not be presented as neutral and finished, but as something deeply human, full of struggles, passions, and competing ideas. This feels especially relevant in science education, where discoveries are often detached from the people and conflicts behind them.

While Egan offers practical frameworks for designing imaginative lessons, implementing them consistently in a time-pressured classroom can be challenging. Still, the book serves as a powerful reminder: before students can learn, they must first care.

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skimmed much of this, but I expect its techniques will be helpful to me as a teacher in bridging the difference between my own ideas of what education is for and the industrial model I have to work within.

[Peaches · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't pull many quotations for this, and I do agree it could have been shorter, but I love Egan's emphasis on the connections of emotions to learning.

[Haylee Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! Lots of practical approaches to helping ignite or rekindle an imagination in ourselves, our teaching, and our students.

[Mandy Botlik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good ideas for classroom engagement, some of them seem intuitive, techniques that come naturally. Some techniques were new to me but most were not.

[Auntie Jessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent guide for those educators interested in implementing imaginative education (IE) practices into their teaching.

This book introduces the theory behind IE while giving specific examples and structures essential for unit-planning and lesson-planning in the framework of the imaginative education curriculum driver ascribed by the IE Research Group out of Simon Fraser University, BC.

Feel free to ask questions, or learn more at www.ierg.net (from an educator, not a sales promotor, firmly believing the viability and success of these ideas!)

[Hannah]

I should say that this isn't a book I gave up on so much as I just realized it wasn't what I was looking for, so I stopped reading. It's actually very good and interesting, but I was hoping for more narrative and less theory, and since I'm not a teacher, I didn't feel the need to read past chapter one and a half.

[Abby]

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/...#

[Empress · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great ideas, and definitely worth a read. But after chapter one he gets quite redundant. Could be a much shorter, simpler book. Still worth a look.

[Soumaya]

Well I can't rate the book as i ICOULDNT FINISH IT
The first chapter was not bad, but then, I felt so bored, I tried hard but couldn't