Abstract
This chapter outlines the practicalities and potentialities of Imaginative Education (IE) for the development of ethical character. The planning frameworks and theoretical grounds of Imaginative Education, as developed by Kieran Egan, offer a workable and effective pedagogical method for the implementation of Values Education. After a brief review of some major principles of IE – the connection between the imagination and cognitive activity, the interiorization of cultural-cognitive tools, and the five kinds of understanding offered in The Educated Mind – an exemplar unit using the Romantic framework will be offered. Dealing with events precipitating and culminating in 2008’s federal apology to Aboriginal Canadians, the exemplar unit will be discussed in order to demonstrate how IE finds especial resonance for the implementation of the VEd project. In suggesting that the intellectual, emotional, and ethical realms grow together, the chapter will conclude by contrasting a didactic mode of Values Education with that from an imaginative and pedagogical stance. This implies a methodology characterized by the emergence of inductive reasoning and tolerant of a plurality of perspectives, an approach suggesting that while values of character can be learned, they cannot necessarily be taught.
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Notes
- 1.
The comparative histories of Australia’s Aborigines and Canada’s First Peoples are quite striking. Without needing to delve into every instance, issues of land ownership, cultural assimilation, and the role of residential schools dominate. Shifts in cultural awareness and governmental policy led to official apologies by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February of 2008 and by Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper in June of the same year.
- 2.
Although we have elected not to use the word here, the notion of “grist” may prove helpful. IE purports that imagination, as such, needs something to be imaginative both with and about; so to speak, “grist for the mill”. There are, of course, other treatments of intelligence such as the popularized theories of Howard Gardner which, to some, may provoke musings about “mathematical imagination” or “spatial imagination”. Such domain specific conceptualizations are not our particular focus of study here, but we would certainly encourage response and healthy dialogue investigating the potential alignments and incommensurabilities between the two bodies of ideas.
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Waddington, T., Johnson, J. (2010). Imaginative Education and the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools: Practical Implementations for Promoting Ethical Understanding. In: Lovat, T., Toomey, R., Clement, N. (eds) International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8675-4_32
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