Imagination in teaching and learning

Imagination, or what one poet calls her “star of free will” has been variously described as the essence of genius; as the capacity to think of things as possibly being so; as a broad flexibility of mind; as the ability to conceive of the unusual and effective; as a formative ability; as a consequence of the interplay of language itself; and, more recently as a disruption in thinking occasioned by luck due to the inadequacies of rule-following. Such conceptions are helpful in our thinking about imagination in the classroom and will be used in this paper to develop a working definition even though they do not explain in the particular case what steps to follow to achieve an imaginative outcome. Fortunately it is not necessary to have totally a transparent concept in order to facilitate students' imaginative work in a practical realm because what educators have instead are norms of practice, experience, examples, experimentation, trial and error, poetry, personal insights, and first-hand accounts (among other things). This paper will examine, critically, a number of such sources with a view to gaining a better understanding of imagination and its pedagogical implications. Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.