Abstract

Engaging imaginations and emotions with the world

 

Engaging imaginations and emotions with the world explores how the cognitive toolkits we learn to use in our everyday development can be used to enable students to understand the physical environment around them, and to feel emotional and aesthetic connections with it. The talk will discuss the cognitive tools that come along with our bodies—senses, emotions, humour, patterning, etc.—and also those that come along with learning an oral language—stories, binary opposites, images from words, etc.—and those that come along with learning literacy—extremes of reality, the exotic, heroic associations, personification of objects, etc. Examples of how these can be used in teaching students about the natural world.

 

Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University (Canada)

 

Kieran Egan is a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada (http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/). His work deals both with innovative educational theory and detailed practical methods whereby implications of the theory can be applied at the classroom level. He has published more than twenty books, with about forty translations into twenty languages.  His books include The Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), and Learning in Depth: A simple innovation that can transform schooling (university of Chicago Press, 2010). He is a director of the Imaginative Education Research Group (http://www.ierg.net).