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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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