Pedagogies of the Imagination : Mythopoetic Curriculum in Educational Practice

This book is about the practice of Imaginal Knowing in education. Imaginal knowing is not fantasy, but is linked to the way humans imagine the real world. Imaginal knowing moves the heart, holds the imagination, finds the fit between self-stories, public myths, and the content of cultural knowledge. It is deeply personal, yet open to the universe. The curriculum, as conceptualized here, is the medium through which imaginal knowing is evoked in both teachers and students. Educators from United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada offer a vision of educational practice seasoned in years of reflective pedagogic engagement. They speak here of a genuine and practical alternative to overly bureaucratic educational processes that can crush learners through a closed system of arbitrary standards and mindless testing. There is hope that education at all levels from elementary to professional, graduate and post compulsory education has the capacity to break out of these artificial constraints. These authors show us ways to make this possible. Front Matter....Pages i-xviii Introduction....Pages 1-8 Watching with Two Eyes: The Place of the Mythopoetic in Curriculum Inquiry....Pages 11-29 The Shadow of Hope: Reconciliation and Imaginal Pedagogies....Pages 31-51 Myth in the Practice of Reason: The Production of Education and Productive Confusion....Pages 53-63 Care of the Self: Mythopoetic Dimensions of Professional Preparation and Development....Pages 65-82 Imagination and Mythopoesis in the Science Curriculum....Pages 83-91 The Mythopoetic Body: Learning Through Creativity....Pages 93-106 Autobiography and Poetry....Pages 107-124 The Resilience of Soul....Pages 125-136 Imaginal Transformation and Schooling....Pages 139-155 Idealism and Materialism in the Culture of Teacher Education: The Mythopoetic Significance of Things....Pages 157-167 Spiritual Grounding and Adult Education....Pages 169-176 Ignatian Spirituality as Mythopoesis....Pages 177-188 Mythopoetic Spaces in the (Trans)formation of Counselors and Therapists....Pages 189-201 Critical Pedagogy and the Mythopoetic: A Case Study from Adelaide’s Northern Urban Fringe....Pages 203-222 Capacity and Currere ....Pages 223-229 Thinking, Feeling, and Willing: How Waldorf Schools Provide a Creative Pedagogy That Nurtures and Develops Imagination....Pages 231-243 Getting a Feel for the Work: Mythopoetic Pedagogy for Adult Educators Through Phenomenological Evocation....Pages 245-263 Conclusion: The Mythopoetic Challenge....Pages 265-266 Back Matter....Pages 267-269 I have long admired the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies. That admiration followed from my experience as a high-school teacher of English in a wealthy suburb of New York City at the end of the 1960s. A “dream” job—I taught four classes of 15–20 students during a nine-period day—in a “dream” suburb (where I could afford to reside only by taking a room in a retired teacher's house), many of these often Ivy-League-bound students had everything but meaningful lives. This middle-class, Midwestern young teacher was flabbergasted. In one sense, my academic life has been devoted to understanding that searing experience. Matters of meaning seemed paramount in the curriculum field to which Paul Klohr introduced me at Ohio State. Klohr assigned me the work of curriculum theorists such as James B. Macdonald. Like Timothy Leonard (who also studied with Klohr at Ohio State) and Peter Willis, Macdonald (1995) understood that school reform was part of a broader cultural and political crisis in which meaning is but one casualty. In the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies, scholars labor to understand this crisis and the conditions for the reconstruction of me- ing in our time, in our schools.