Values and Imagination in Teaching: With a Special Focus on Social Studies

Abstract

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about SocialStudies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is true of Social Studies is also largely reflected in general texts concerning planning teaching. Clearly many theorists and practitioners are concerned to engage students' imaginations in learning, even though they use terms other than 'imagination' in doing so. This article suggests that a more explicit attention to imagination can make our efforts to engage students in learning more effective. We provide, first, a working definition of imagination, then show how students' imaginations can be characterized in terms of the 'cognitive toolkits' they bring to learning. We look at such 'cognitive tools' as stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery and how these can be used to engage students' imaginations in learning Social Studies and other content from kindergarten to about grade four. We then consider 'cognitive tools' commonly deployed by students from about grade four to grade nine, including a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic. We also provide examples of how using such tools could influence planning and teaching Social Studies topics.

The Combination of Imaginative Teaching Methods and Multimedia Learning in Early Childhood Education during COVID Pandemic: Social-Emotional and Language Development

“…Learning tends to make children get stuck in front of a screen monitor because various activities cannot be done freely. Therefore, learning based on innovative methods can be an option for early childhood, whose characters still tend to be explorative (Egan & Judson, 2009). This imaginative learning method can efficiently be combined with learning multimedia, which does involve technology massively.…”

“…The use of multimedia learning can provide more benefits by using appropriate teaching methods. According to Egan and Judson (2009), the teacher can use the innovative approach with the exploratory character to teach children in their early years. Combining the imaginative teaching method and multimedia learning in preschool gives children the freedom to express ideas, opinions, imaginations, and imaginative capabilities in their tasks and activities (Yafie, 2017).…”

‘No, no, the Cold War was not that dramatic’: A case study on the use of a drama task to promote Dutch secondary school students’ historical imagination

“…Therefore, scholars argue that these types of tasks can lead students towards misconceptions about the past, such as presentism, which is the transfer of values and information from the present to the past (Brooks, 2009;Wilschut, 2012). For the same reason, teachers can also be concerned about working with imagination tasks (Egan and Judson, 2008).…”

“…By impersonating a historical actor, drama can be a tool to deal with questions about human motivations, feelings and actions in history (Rainer and Lewis, 2012). A drama task can also help students to grasp the role of historical characters and to understand their actions (Egan and Judson, 2008;Stevens, 2015). Furthermore, drama could lead to an in-depth understanding of history through taking a detailed look at a particular time (Fennessey, 2000;Rainer and Lewis, 2012), especially when students themselves do the necessary research (Rantala et al, 2016).…”

Convergence among imagination, social-emotional learning and media literacy: an integrative literature review

“…Pedagogical perspective Nielsen (2006) discerns drama or role play, exploration, story, ritual and routine, arts, discussion and empathy as imagination-based teaching methods. Besides, Egan and Judson (2009) specify that cognitive tools of story, mental images, abstract binary oppositions, jokes and humour, sense of mystery, sense of reality, extremes of reality and limits of experience, association with the heroic, transcendent human qualities and sense of wonder, promote imagination. Although the levels of empathy that are activated by drama are also activated by engagement with fiction narratives (Goldstein & Bloom, 2010), we have not encountered studies using fictional stories as vehicle for empathy development.…”