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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
How to nurture creativity in tomorrow's innovators--today's college students When asked what they want colleges to emphasize most, employers didn't put science, computing, math, or business management first. According to AAC&U's 2013 employer survey, 95% of employers give hiring preference to college graduates with skills that will enable them to contribute to innovation in the workplace. In Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers, two leading educators help college instructors across disciplines engage students in nurturing creativity and innovation for success beyond the classroom. Alison James, an expert in creative arts education, and Stephen D. Brookfield, bestselling author, outline how creative exploration can extend students' reflective capabilities in a purposeful way, help them understand their own potential and learning more clearly, and imbue students with the freedom to generate and explore new questions. This book: * shows why building creative skills pays dividends in the classroom and in students' professional lives long after graduation; * offers research-based, classroom-tested approaches to cultivating creativity and innovation in the college setting; * provides practical tools for incorporating "play" into the college curriculum; * draws on recent advances in the corporate sector where creative approaches have been adopted to reinvigorate thinking and problem-solving processes; and * includes examples from a variety of disciplines and settings. Engaging Imagination is for college and university faculty who need to prepare students for the real challenges of tomorrow's workplace.
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Engaging Imagination
Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers
Alison James and Stephen D. Brookfield
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover image : © Sergey Nivens/Thinkstock (RF)
Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-118-40947-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-118-83619-4 (ebk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-836118- (ebk.)
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Part 1 Understanding the Role of Imagination in Learning
1 How Engaging the Imagination Fosters Reflective Thinking
The Three Axioms of Student Engagement
How Does Engaging Imagination Connect to Reflection?
Fourteen Elements of Reflective Thinking in Students
Summary
2 Introducing Reflective Thinking to Students
Clarifying the Elements of Reflective Thinking
Modeling Reflectivity: Examples for Each Reflective Thinking Process
Using Students' Testimony
Student Resistance to Reflective Control
Summary
3 Connecting Creativity, Imagination, and Play
Emotional Intelligence
The Place of Creativity in Student and Teacher Reflection
Defining Creativity
Connecting Imagination to Creativity
The Meaning of Play
Summary
Part 2 Engaging Imagination Tools and Techniques
4 Using Visual Methods of Teaching and Learning
Losing Sight of Seeing: A Rural Walk
Visual Intelligence and Visual Literacy
The Duck/Rabbit: “Seeing As”
Learning to See Visual Culture: An Urban Walk
Sketchbooks and Look Books
Paper Tearing as Visual Representation
The Plait
LSD
Drawing and Collaging Discussion
Visual Dialogue
Visualization Techniques
Summary
5 How Story and Metaphor Provoke Reflective Thinking
Creative Reflection and Metaphor
Roller Coasters, Rainbows, and Other Learning Metaphors
Dyslexia: The Bully in My Playground
Tell Us about It
Diagrams as Story Triggers: The Change Curve
Timelines
Metaphor as Parable
Summary
6 Playing Seriously: Legos and Labyrinths
The Concept of Lego Serious Play
Labyrinths for Creative Reflection
Summary
7 Playing with Space: Pods and Patchwork
Learning Spaces
Hello Cloud 9: The Reflective Pod
The Spliff Bunker
Other Forms of Reflective Pod Engagements
Postcards and Patchworks
Spatial Design and Inner/Outer Space
Inner Reflection on Outer Presentations
Summary
8 Asking Powerful Questions
Personal Construct Psychology and Creative Reflection
Clean Language
Summary
9 Building Reflective Communities: Maps and Mazes
Wenger's Communities of Practice
Maps, Membership, and Mazes
The Picture Group
Six Degrees of Separation
Wikis as Online Spaces for Shared Reflection
The Digital Transformations Research Project
Summary
Part 3 Negotiating the Emotional Realities of Engaging Imagination
10 Keeping Energy and Morale High
Frogs and Bats
Plates, Timelines, and the Reflectionaire
Appreciative Inquiry and Strengths-Based Learning
Strengths and Flow
When the Going Gets Tough: Techniques for Building Confidence
Techniques for Troubleshooting: The Life Wheel and Covey's Circles of Concern
The Emotional Pathfinder
The Emotional Pathfinder Framework
Reflection as Speculation: Modeling Cause and Effect
Summary
11 Engaging Our Own Imaginations as Authors
References
Index
Cross-Merchandising Advertisements
List of Tables
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 The Stages of the Emotional Pathfinder
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Polarities of Reflection
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Multimodal Forms of Reflection
Figure 3.2 The Interplay between Different Constituents of Creative Reflection
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 The Hidey Hole; Seeing the Forest from Different Angles
Figure 4.2 Forest Directions
Figure 4.3 Visual Representations of Students' Experiences
Figure 4.4 Jastrow's Duck/Rabbit
Figure 4.5 Pebble Union Jack, Dunwich Beach, Suffolk: Visual Culture in Unexpected Forms and Places
Figure 4.6 Paper-Tearing Exercise: One Chilly Winter Morning
Figure 4.7 Thinking Laterally: LSD as Pounds, Shillings, and Pence in Old British Currency
Figure 4.8 Alison's Visual Dialogue with Julian Burton
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Three Views of Scratching below the Surface
Figure 5.2 U Is for University
Figure 5.3 The Change Curve
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The “Black Splat”
Figure 6.2 Metaphorical Model with Coins and Skeletons
Figure 6.3 Lego Model of Student Journey
Figure 6.4 Eye-Level View, Lego Model
Figure 6.5 Building Shared Models for Collaborative Reflection
Figure 6.6 A View of the University of Kent Labyrinth
Figure 6.7 Finger Labyrinth on Bench, University of Kent Labyrinth
Figure 6.8 Candlelit Labyrinth at LightNight Liverpool, 2011
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 “Cloud 9”: The Reflective Pod
Figure 7.2 Reflective Postcard: Anna Samygina
Figure 7.3 Reflective Postcard: Chiaki Matsumoto
Figure 7.4 The Motivating Teaching and Learning Quilt
Figure 7.5 The Motivating Teaching and Learning Quilt: Detail
Figure 7.6
Quercus genius
“Before” Photo
Figure 7.7
Quercus genius
“Before” Photo
Figure 7.8
Quercus genius
, Spring 2012
Figure 7.9
Quercus genius
: Book Detail
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Construct Categorization Undertaken by Nick Reed, Sarah Holborow, and Charlotte Devereaux Walsh: Two Views
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Screen Shot of PPD Coach
Figure 9.2 Communities-of-Practice Case Studies
Figure 9.3 Frank the Frog
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 The Frog
Figure 10.2 The Bat
Figure 10.3 Alison's Input Line on the First Manuscript Draft, October 2011–12
Figure 10.4 Stephen and the 99ers
Figure 10.5 Alison and Harvey
Figure 10.6 What Shape Is Your Life? A Version of the Life Wheel
Figure 10.7 Our Version of the Nesta Evidence Modeling Activity
Guide
Cover
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Preface
This book is a tale of two coffees. It had its origins in a London café in summer 2011, when we met for the first time to share mutual interests in student reflection. Alison had contacted Stephen by e-mail to let him know she had been using his Critical Incident Questionnaire (Brookfield, 2006) in her teaching at the London College of Fashion. Because Stephen would be visiting London a few months later, we decided to get together and chat about the different ways we each worked with students to develop reflective and critical thinking. Although Stephen had done some workshops at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the world of creative arts education was unfamiliar to him. But he was intrigued to find out more about how Alison worked within that setting.
As we talked, we both agreed that visual and kinesthetic approaches to teaching reflective thought and practice, although central to certain creative arts disciplines, are largely unknown to teachers in other areas. We agreed that these kinds of approaches hold the possibility of migrating effectively from creative arts teaching to multiple settings. We wondered about drawing together our different experiences of teaching reflection under the umbrella of engaging imagination. We both want our classrooms to be ones in which students are engaged as learners, and we talked about the link between the use of imaginative activities and the creation of enlivening and engaging classrooms.
Eventually our conversation morphed into a book proposal and then into the book you now have in your hands (or on your screen). We decided to collaborate partly because this would open us up to each other's different worldviews and practices. Our assumption is that a strong part of becoming a better teacher is committing to learning new ways of thinking about, and doing, our pedagogic work. Our collaboration across a physical ocean and two continents, and across different intellectual paradigms, has been mutually engaging, and we hope this spirit of playful creativity comes through in our writing. An English College of Fashion and an American Catholic university are certainly very different environments. Yet we believe that colleagues in both institutions are equally interested in helping students become critically reflective and in creating lively classrooms that engage students.
In Engaging Imagination our purpose is to show how students develop and sharpen their personal, professional, and political understandings through an engagement in multiple classroom activities. We draw on multisensory approaches to learning—visual and verbal, kinesthetic and cognitive, online and off-line, solo study and group work, large and small numbers of students—and travel across domains of time and space. Our focus, as befits our different backgrounds, is interdisciplinary, but what unites us is the focus on using creativity, imagination, and play to help students learn how to be critically reflective. We recognize that our approaches are not for every unit of study or every classroom; learners, teachers, outcomes, contexts, purposes, and subjects are all deciding factors in selecting what techniques to use and determining what will work. Some of you may have come across some of the activities described in this book in some guise already. What you decide to use, as with any teaching ideas, materials, or theories, will be a matter of personal preference, teaching style, and selection according to curricular purpose.
This is a book about practice, yet we would classify it not so much as a “how to,” but as more of a “what if?” book. What if we take more imaginative approaches and integrate them into what we do already, in whatever form that exists? What if we change the reflective questions, prompts, and structures that we, and our students, are used to using? What if we, and our students, step outside our comfort zone and do something differently? What if we are playful in our approaches to learning? What do we risk, lose, or gain?
Risk and uncertainty are things that we try to prepare our students to deal with in our volatile and unpredictable social, professional, financial, political, and educational climates. Trying new things in our teaching can be exhilarating but also risky; what if my students don't like new approaches and disengage from learning? Is the devil I know better than the one that's untested? Will playfulness be seen as anti-academic, as somehow not properly intellectual? The idea of playfulness is sometimes hard to fit with the kind of serious, high-minded endeavors that we expect of college and university students. Is this going to be a book about being silly?
Well, no, it is not about being silly. In fact, the ethic of play is a serious matter. When we use activities and approaches that seem like an entertaining distraction from “proper” study on the surface, we always have a deeper intent. We want to jolt ourselves, and students, out of our normal and routine ways of understanding and practicing. In this we build on Herbert Marcuse's (Reitz, 2000; Miles, 2012) argument that aesthetic experiences induce breaks and ruptures from the familiar. When students who are used to text- and teacher-dependent modes of learning switch into a playful mode, they are learning very differently. They are temporarily estranged from the typical experience of listening to a lecture, adding notes to PowerPoints projected during that lecture, and then being split into small-group discussions. Marcuse would argue that they are lifted into a different way of being.
Stephen once heard English philosopher Marghanita Laski on the BBC radio show Start the Week speaking about the notion of everyday ecstasy—the way listening to music for a few minutes, smelling or tasting a new food, or letting your eyes linger on something you thought to be beautiful took you into a different and heightened sensuous way of being for a brief time each day (Laski, 1980). We think what Laski was talking about was essentially the same as Marcuse's: the idea that an aesthetic experience challenges the normal ways of thinking and feeling in everyday life. By extension, we believe that creativity, imagination, and play also accomplish this rupture with ordinary experience, and that students remember imaginative classroom moments as some of the most powerful events in their learning trajectories.
Engaging Imagination offers a mixture of things: exercises, activities, theories, positions, approaches, and people. It is a text of different voices: stories, case studies, anecdotes, and project descriptions. It is a book about questions and assumptions, about dialogue and spaces. We seek to add to the library of resources on alternative modes of learning and assessment and to link the literature of creativity, imagination, and play explicitly to reflective practice. We are not about shutting out traditional approaches to reflection but about extending and adding to them. As we know already, and as you will see further illustrated, writing, the most dominant of these approaches, can be creative, imaginative, and playful as well.
How Should You Use This Book?
The shortest answer to this question is “In any way you like!” Although we have tried to group our chapters into themes, there are recurrent issues, approaches, and theories, such as identity and metaphor, that permeate them all. As befits a text on creativity, imagination, and play, we are fine with a serendipitous skimming, dipping in and out of chapters as particular paragraphs engage you. We also urge you to read the book in conjunction with the Web presence we have created to accompany the text. At http://www.engagingimagination.com you can watch demonstrations of many of the activities we describe in the following pages and also hear from their originators or enactors.
In terms of how the contents can be used in teaching, we have sought to provide all sorts of ideas and activities for encouraging reflective learning that can easily be integrated into a range of settings, whether for five minutes, two hours, or much longer. They can be used at student orientations, to support career progression, to enable someone to write a dissertation, to help with essays, to enhance classroom learning, to complete projects, to assist in formulating design ideas, to prepare for tutorials, to aid private introspection or decision making, to weigh choices, to work out whether a proposal is valid or has originality, or for any other tasks for which the teacher deems them relevant.
Although the theories and models adopted originate in a wide variety of disciplines, several of the case studies are taken from creative arts contexts. If you are an educator working outside these creative fields, do not let this put you off—or not at least until you have read the book and know what you are discarding. After all, one of us—Stephen—teaches in a typically text-dependent, content-heavy discipline. The field of the creative arts is huge and multifaceted. A small part of it might be about designing clothes or artifacts, but its other spheres of activity include creative and visual conception, commercial practice, business and management strategy, local and industrial-scale production systems, and community mobilization. To give just one example, the various encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement involve cartoons, collage, free-form drawing, found poetry, music and drama, as well as more traditional modes of political education. So we see the possibility of adapting imaginative approaches that have their genesis in the creative arts to multiple disciplines and subject matter contexts.
What This Book Is Not
As we have already stressed, this book does not pretend to be a box of magic wands. Although the ideas and techniques we offer have been successful in a range of contexts, we cannot guarantee that they will be popular with everyone. One of Alison's best friends is managing director with a global corporation. One day as the two of them were mucking out horses and chatting over buckets and pitchforks she asked Alison, “So, what's your book actually about then? You've told me the title but I did not quite get it.” Alison said something along the lines of “It's all about how we can use creativity, imagination, and playfulness, with things like Lego and labyrinths, to reflect on our learning in different ways.” “Ah,” said her friend conversationally, “I'd hate that.”
Being a generous, as well as honest, person, Alison's friend was quick to recognize, however, that this was a personal view, at the same time noting how many playful or unconventional approaches are increasingly popular for fostering organizational learning. Go to any team-building or communications workshop offered by an organization, and chances are that you will be asked to engage in something kinetic (such as falling backward, trusting that colleagues will catch you before you hit the ground), visual (such as drawing what a productive day looks like), or physically risky (such as undertaking a ropes course that requires you to overcome a fear of heights). Of the two of us, Stephen is notoriously wary of “touchy-feely” exercises, so your authorial team has a built-in skeptic. Yet some of the most memorable moments of Stephen's own learning autobiography involve music, not words.
We have already stated, and will reiterate throughout the book, that part of the success in using imaginative approaches is to allow for freedom and flexibility of choice wherever possible. Just because a particular strategy or exercise has been received enthusiastically by physicists or welders does not mean it will necessarily appeal to the same extent to tutu makers or critical theorists. Equally, we may have assumed that approaches that suit product designers won't work with elite sports faculty, and then find to our astonishment that we were wrong.
One thing we do know is that some of the approaches we propose can appear to some colleagues as self-indulgent navel gazing, or pseudo-therapy in disguise. Or they may hear the term reflective practice and see institutional monitoring lurking in the not-so-dim background. We know from experience that suggesting imaginative or playful approaches is often met with the response “My students would never go for that,” or “That sounds fine for artists but it just doesn't fit with engineering, geography, or medicine.” We know that attending to gut feelings is important, but we also subscribe to the cliché that you never know until you try.
Overview of Chapters
We begin the book with a chapter arguing that engaging imagination fosters reflective thinking and in which we propose three axioms of student engagement. We define what we mean by reflection and explore fourteen elements of reflective thinking in students. Chapter 2 then considers how best to introduce students to reflective thinking by clarifying what it entails, beginning with modeling, and using students' testimonies. The connection between creativity and reflective thinking is the focus of chapter 3. We also explore the notion of multiple intelligences, connect imagination to creativity, and clarify the meaning of play. In chapter 4 we set out the case for creative reflection in visual form, illustrated by diverse aspects of visual theory: perception, literacy, and visual intelligence. We present activities that include ways of seeing and not seeing, such as visual research, visual dialogue, and visualization. We look (pun intended!) at a number of activities, including Jastrow's duck/rabbit, the use of urban and rural walks, sketchbooks and look books, paper tearing, the plait, and collaging classroom discussions.
Our attention shifts to narrative, story, and especially metaphor in chapter 5, where metaphors such as dyslexia as the bully in the playground are examined. Our analysis investigates the “Tell Us about It” initiative, diagrams as story triggers, the use of timelines, and how metaphors can act as parables. Playing seriously through the use of Lego building blocks and through labyrinth walking are considered in chapter 6, where we outline a workshop in which students use Lego materials to construct physical metaphors of their learning journeys. Then we examine how labyrinth walks can be used to engender creative reflection and insights. The focus of chapter 7 is on the impact of space on students' readiness to engage in reflective learning. We look at permanent, temporary, natural, and human-made spaces and discuss adjustments to the physical environment and the creation of outdoor spaces. The chapter introduces the Reflective Pod, the spliff bunker, postcards and patchworks, and the connections between inner and outer space.
We mine the fields of psychology and clinical therapy to analyze how to ask good questions in chapter 8, drawing on Kelly's personal construct psychology to help students challenge their assumptions and clarify their thinking through self-characterization, laddering, and pyramiding. The chapter also examines the use of clean questions as a means of allowing someone to reflect without imposing the values, views, and opinions of the questioner on the person's thought processes. Etienne Wenger's notion of communities of practice is our basis for exploring creative and imaginative approaches to working collaboratively in groups, networks, and communities in chapter 9. We provide case studies such as Maps, Memberships, and Mazes; the Picture Group; Six Degrees of Separation; wikis; and the Digital Transformations project.
Chapter 10 scrutinizes how the peaks and troughs of student energy and engagement should be managed. We review a wide range of approaches to understanding students' energy levels by employing animal analogies such as frogs and bats, as well as paper plates, timelines, and reflectionaires. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow is central to our analysis, and we use that, our version of the Life Wheel, and Covey's Circles of Concerns to understand best how to channel students' energies as learners. The Emotional Pathfinder and the Nesta Creative Enterprise Toolkit provide additional techniques for keeping morale for learning high.
Chapter 11—our final chapter—concludes with some personal reflections on our experience of co-authorship. The two of us write about the ways our own imaginative capacities have been engaged and expanded during the writing of this book.
Audience
Our audience for this book is potentially enormous—any teacher who wishes to use imagination, creativity, and play in order to engage students in reflective and critical thinking. Most of the activities are probably best suited to university and college students and to different forms of adult education and training. But we also know that a lot of them can be adapted to K–12 primary and secondary classrooms. As we were writing this book, we received requests about the techniques it demonstrates from teachers as diverse as further education teachers, university lecturers, community and technical college instructors, staff and professional developers, art college instructors, organizational and corporate trainers, fashion institute teachers, adult basic education tutors, social movement activists, military trainers, community group facilitators, seminarians, online program designers, parent educators, health education professionals, proprietary school teachers, and environmental educators. We believe that's an accurate representation of the kinds of teachers, trainers, and instructors who will find this book helpful.
Acknowledgments
Alison acknowledges the expertise and contributions of the many people who feature in this book, as well as those who have supported its development less directly. All have variously and freely offered time, content, stories, activities, photographs, and recommended readings; made good suggestions; and opened their address books. In particular she thanks the following individuals:
At the London College of Fashion/University of the Arts, London:
David Garner, Clare Lomas, Rob Lakin, Terry Finnigan, Benedicta Kilburn, Janice Miller, Sina Shamsavari, Nicky Ryan, Shibboleth Shechter, and Professor Hilary Grainger
And externally:
Nick Reed, Pat Francis, Julian Burton, Caitlin Walker, Professor David Gauntlett, Stuart Nolan, Jan Sellers, Sonia Overall, Gary Pritchard, Ian Bride, Lynne Dorling, Bernard Moss, Hilary Wilson, Noam Austerlitz, Kay Sandor, and Alex Irving
She is also immensely grateful to David Brightman at Jossey-Bass for having had faith in the book from its earliest stages.
A debt of gratitude and respect is also due to the many authors and educators cited in this book whose work has been enjoyed and respected and has shaped the ideas expressed.
Finally, her warmest thanks go to Stephen, an ideal writing partner who has always been generous and wise; thanks to his expertise and insights she has had the opportunity to view academic practice through wider, different eyes.
Stephen acknowledges and thanks Alison for inviting him on the ride of co-authorship of a book that truly widened his own imagination. As anally compulsive as he is, Alison's continual introduction of new exercises and activities kept Stephen in a constant state of productive uncertainty, never knowing what was coming next! He is immensely grateful to her for everything he has learned. Stephen also makes special acknowledgment to the University of St. Thomas, and particularly to Sue Huber, executive vice-president and provost, for supporting his visits to London to work intensively with Alison on the writing of the manuscript.
Finally, we extend our thanks to all our students, named, “aliased,” or anonymous, those of you who have taken part in the exercises and practices included, as well as those of you who haven't. You are why we teach.
About the Authors
Alison James is associate dean, Learning & Teaching, at the London College of Fashion, and in her higher education career has focused on working with creative arts staff and students. Her first degree (1978) was in modern foreign languages (French and Italian), and she did her best to avoid going into education for eight years after graduation, working, among other things, as an interpreter and reflexologist, as well as for institutions as diverse as the Royal Institute of British Architects and a natural medicine clinic. The moment she took up a teaching post, she wondered why it had taken her so long.
As a mature student she achieved a distinction in her MA in education and followed this swiftly with a PhD in the life and work of the Royal Academician Dod Procter, and a monograph on this same artist, A Singular Vision (2007). While studying she worked in full-time learning and teaching roles and developed her long-standing interests in alternative and creative pedagogies, identity and self-construction in learning contexts, reflective practice, and personal and professional development. She has presented widely on all of these subjects and published in creative arts journals and edited collections. In 2013 she received an excellent teaching award from the University of the Arts, London, for her work with Lego Serious Play and student learning. She is married to Glyn, and they have six children: Kimberley, Michelle, Tom, Ashley, Rachel, and Poppy. The family is currently being expanded by one grandchild, two horses, four cats, and mysterious numbers of fish in the garden pond.
The father of Molly and Colin, and the husband of Kim, Stephen D. Brookfield is the John Ireland Endowed Chair at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis–St. Paul. He received his BA degree (1970) from Lanchester College of Technology (Coventry, UK) in modern studies, his MA degree (1974) from the University of Reading (UK) in sociology, and his PhD degree (1980) from the University of Leicester (UK) in adult education. He also holds a postgraduate diploma (1971) from the University of London, Chelsea College (UK), in modern social and cultural studies and a postgraduate diploma (1977) from the University of Nottingham (UK) in adult education. In 1991 he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University System of New Hampshire for his contributions to understanding adult learning. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Concordia University for his contributions to adult education. In 2010 Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters for educational leadership in the scholarship of teaching.
Stephen began his teaching career in 1970 and has held appointments at colleges of further, technical, adult, and higher education in the United Kingdom and at universities in Canada (University of British Columbia) and the United States (Columbia University, Teachers College, and the University of St. Thomas). In 1989 he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Technical and Adult Teacher Education in what is now the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. In 2002 he was visiting professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. In 2003–04 he was the Helen Le Baron Hilton Chair at Iowa State University. He has run numerous workshops on teaching, adult learning, and critical thinking around the world and delivered many keynote addresses at regional, national, and international education conferences.
In 2001 he received the Leadership Award from the Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) for “extraordinary contributions to the general field of continuing education on a national and international level.” In 2008 he received the University of St. Thomas John Ireland Presidential Award for Outstanding Achievement as a Teacher/Scholar, and also the University of St. Thomas Diversity Leadership Teaching and Research Award. Also in 2008 he was awarded the Morris T. Keeton Medal by the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning for “outstanding contributions to adult and experiential learning.” In 2009 he was inducted into the International Adult Education Hall of Fame.
He is a six-time winner of the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education: in 1986 for his book Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis of Principles and Effective Practices (1986); in 1989 for Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting (1987); in 1996 for Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (1995); in 2005 for The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching (2004); in 2011 for his book with John D. Holst, Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just World (2010); and in 2012 for Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions (2011). Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning also won the 1986 Imogene E. Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education. These awards were all presented by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. The first edition of Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (2nd ed., 2005), which he co-authored with Stephen Preskill, was a 1999 Critics Choice of the Educational Studies Association. His other books are Adult Learners, Adult Education and the Community (1984), Self-Directed Learning: From Theory to Practice (1985), Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on Adult Education and Social Change (1987), Training Educators of Adults: The Theory and Practice of Graduate Adult Education (1988), The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust and Responsiveness in the Classroom (2nd ed., 2006), Teaching Reflectively in Theological Contexts: Promises and Contradictions (co-edited with Mary Hess, 2008), Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (co-authored with Stephen Preskill, 2008), Handbook of Race and Adult Education (co-edited with Vanessa Sheared, Scipio Colin III, Elizabeth Peterson, and Juanita Johnson, 2010), and Powerful Techniques for Teaching Adults (2012).
Part 1Understanding the Role of Imagination in Learning
1How Engaging the Imagination Fosters Reflective Thinking
Imagination is the key to human progress. Without the capacity to imagine a different world that is more beautiful than the one in which we live, change is impossible. Why would we strive for something better or different if we didn't have the imagination to conceive of a more beautiful way of living? The capacity to imagine is part of what makes us human. It is essentially a creative impulse that people build on as they conceive of, and realize, new social forms and artistic processes. Imagination is also often playful and elusive. It revels in serendipity, in unexpected connections, chance meetings, and seeing the everyday and familiar in new ways.
The unpredictability of engaging the imagination makes it hard to adapt to classroom environments ruled by rigid assessment protocols. If we have decreed in advance the evidence we will use to measure whether or not learning has occurred, there is little room for divergence or the unexpected. This virtual outlawing of so many facets of creativity is one of the travesties of higher education. If education is supposed to draw students out, to help them understand new ideas, practice new skills, and make meaningful personal connections to learning, then it makes no sense to declare in advance that certain modes of expression are off the table.
To pose a provocative challenge: Why shouldn't doctoral science students dance their PhDs (Bohannon, 2011)? Why are we not open to varied expressive modes—video, art, drama, poetry, music—to gauge students' learning? If there are multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2011), if students' diverse histories, cultural backgrounds, racial identities, and personalities mean teaching and learning is inevitably complex (Allen, Sheve, and Nieter, 2010), then shouldn't our approaches to helping and assessing learning exhibit a similar variety? Even in something as highly structured as online education it's clear that creativity, variety, and imagination are crucial to retaining student interest and participation (Conrad and Donaldson, 2011, 2012).
This book is about finding ways to increase the number of imaginative moments that students encounter in contemporary classrooms. We both work from the assumption that when students learn something using different senses and when they study the same content through different modalities, there is a depth and complexity to their learning that is absent when only one format—filling in the lines next to PowerPoint slides projected during a lecture, for example—is adopted. For learning to “stick,” whether it is understanding a complex new concept, applying existing knowledge in unfamiliar contexts, or honing a newly developed psychomotor skill, the fullest range of our imaginative faculties needs to be engaged. Both of us love listening to well-constructed and delivered lectures and reading well-written texts. Equally, however, we both know that the broader the range of imaginative activities we're involved in, the more engaged we are with the learning.
Allied to imagination is the notion of engagement. Exercising imagination is inherently engaging, so a classroom in which students use their imaginations to study content, play with ideas, and imagine new possibilities should be an engaging one. Engaging students is something we hear about all the time, but we know that some colleagues assume that student engagement means “teaching-lite.” “Teaching-lite” is a view of teaching whereby teachers are deemed to use superficial activities, social media, and games to convince students that learning is “fun,” thereby securing favorable student evaluations. Effort, hard work, and struggle seem excluded in this stereotype. Colleagues subscribing to this caricature usually assume that engagement means going easy on students and never asking them to take on anything challenging. A false dichotomy is then created between engagement and “real learning”; that is, between learning that is superficial and that which is substantial, important, not much fun, and requires enormous effort.
We agree that learning sometimes is fun. But equally we know that learning is sometimes difficult, frustrating, and a long hard slog. We acknowledge that although classroom learning is certainly enjoyable at times, it also involves struggle, arduous work, and, yes, boredom. Before we can engage creatively and critically with ideas and practices, we often have to struggle to learn the fundamentals of a discipline, the grammar of a subject. We need to understand axiomatic principles, practice basic skills to a point of expertise, and assimilate foundational building blocks of knowledge. One of us (Stephen) teaches critical social theory, a dense, jargon-ridden body of work for which both a dictionary and considerable powers of perseverance are necessary to make progress. Stephen is the first to admit that his continuing struggle to understand this material is one that involves a lot of hard, and often frustrating, labor.
But living with frustration, motivating oneself for the long haul of learning, and negotiating continual challenges is helped considerably by moments of imaginative engagement. When we come at difficult material in new and unexpected ways, when we try to convey complex meanings visually or kinetically rather than through language (dancing our PhD!), and when we ask the question “What would this look like if …?,” we often find our energy for the hard slog is renewed. The important point about using imagination is that we are using it to engage students with the most challenging, difficult, and substantial learning that we judge they need to undertake. Engagement is precisely what it says: helping students engage with knowledge, concepts, ideas, and skills to an ever-higher degree of expertise. There is nothing inherently superficial or unchallenging about engagement; in fact it's the opposite of superficiality. Indeed, we would argue that it is the only hope of ever getting students to understand complex content or develop exemplary skillfulness.
The Three Axioms of Student Engagement
In engaging students—in helping them to develop deeper levels of understanding and to demonstrate higher levels of accomplishment—we need to be imaginative in thinking about different ways to teach that provoke learning. Our position regarding the importance of imagination in teaching is built on three essential pedagogic axioms:
Student learning is deepest when the content or skills being learned are personally meaningful, and this happens when students see connections and applications of learning. Connections and applications occur when creative synthesis takes place, when people suddenly see unexpected patterns emerging, and when new questions are posed. Doing these things involves creativity and imagination.
Student learning “sticks” more (in other words, retention of knowledge and skill is increased) when the same content or skills are learned through multiple methods. A monochromatic approach that adopts one pedagogic strategy overwhelmingly (always using discussions, always lecturing, always studying independently, always using language to communicate learning) is at odds with the empirical reality of students' multiple intelligences, different models of information processing, and variety of culturally preferred learning styles.
The most memorable critical incidents students experience in their learning are those when they are required to “come at” their learning in a new way, when they are “jerked out” of the humdrum by some unexpected challenge or unanticipated task. We naturally remember the surprising rather than the routine, the unpredictable rather than the expected. One of the best ways to create memorable learning moments is to ask students to use their imaginations to ask “What if?” Upending the normal and familiar can be threatening and confusing, but it is usually also unforgettable. So a large part of student engagement entails creating moments of productive discomfort when expectations are reversed and different faculties are called into play—as, for example, when students are asked only to draw or dance their ideas, or to use Legos to build a model of their developing understanding of a topic.
Our belief in the importance of engaging imagination rests on these three axioms, so let's say a little more about them.
Engagement Is Personally Meaningful
The first axiom focuses on meaningfulness, on students appreciating that the knowledge and skills being learned are important and necessary in some way. Now, importance and necessity are not the same as utilitarian. We can study something that has no immediate vocational application yet find it enthralling. An artist can be fascinated by the scientific principle of falsifiability (the idea that unless something is open to empirical disconfirmation it cannot be considered scientific), and a scientist can be enthralled by the creativity of a Cyril Power or the Clash. But we believe that the scientist and the artist in these two examples are captivated because something about scientific falsifiability or artistic creativity “speaks” to them.
In other words, some truth, which might not be able to be concretely articulated, rests in the respective objects of contemplation. Perhaps the artist finds falsifiability an interesting notion because it is so contrary to her experience, and therefore poses an interesting challenge. Or perhaps falsifiability is intriguing because its emphasis on the importance of direct experience is also compelling for her in artistic expression. The scientist, at the same time, may find that Power's linocuts, or Joe Strummer's vocals, prompt an immediate visceral response that is very different from the pleasure derived from science. Maybe there is a suggestion of the erotic or animal, or a fascination with line or form that seems totally unrelated to scientific convention. But in both instances the connections with new forms of understanding are personally meaningful; they are not apprehended at a distance, but rather felt as somehow personally significant.
Of course, it is much easier to see learning as personally meaningful in situations in which students understand that a direct application to their life, work, or self-awareness is entailed. Thus, studying philosophy is often justified as preparing students to work through ethical dilemmas or to live with the ambiguity they will find in adulthood. Social work or engineering courses are deemed to provide vocationally necessary skills that will secure employment and advance a career. Psychology is taught to help students develop insight into their own actions and the justifications for these so that they become more self-aware. Our position is that where such clear connections are absent, it is still pedagogically important to find imaginative ways of helping students discover personal meaning in learning.
Learning “Sticks” When Multiple Methods Engage the Imagination
This axiom regarding engaging imagination is much less philosophically dense than the first. As researchers into student engagement have shown (Barkley, 2009; Bean, 2011), asking students to “come at” the same knowledge or skills in different ways has multiple benefits. First, it is more successful in promoting “deeper” learning (Ohlson, 2011); that is, learning where students understand the complexity of content and the contextual application of skills, and where they can reinterpret experience to change their understanding of the world. It also keeps student interest at higher levels. The more you change up different teaching methods and ask students to try out different classroom, online, or homework activities, the more they stay awake and involved. Alternating verbal and visual modalities, silent and oral ways of communicating, individual and group activities, kinesthetic and cognitive activities, and abstract and concrete ways of processing information keeps the class moving as it calls on different elements of students' personalities and skill sets.
Stephen has spent twenty years collecting data from students across multiple disciplines and institutions regarding their reactions to classroom learning. Through the use of a Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ; http://stephenbrookfield.com/Dr._Stephen_D._Brookfield/Critical_Incident_Questionnaire.html)—an anonymous student response form—he has found that the most enduring reality of college teaching is that the greater the modality of teaching methods used, the higher the level of student engagement; that is, the more students were successful in actively striving to comprehend material, make connections, and apply concepts. The CIQ specifically asks students to identify moments when they were most and least engaged as learners, and actions that helped or hindered this engagement. Repeatedly, students say that the classes where they were most engaged were those where three or four different teaching modalities or learning activities were used.
Students Are Engaged When Something “Jerks” Them Out of the Routines
The most charismatically engaging lecturers and the most responsively alert discussion leaders can still occasionally fall victim to routine. For students, nothing wakes up attention to learning more than being asked to do something unfamiliar and expected. When a student is asked to represent his or her understanding of a concept by building a Lego model, or when a group is asked to draw the discussion they have just had for the whole class to interpret, a level of productive dissonance, of helpful creative panic, is introduced. The disorienting nature of a surprisingly new learning task or unanticipated classroom activity is always vividly remembered, precisely because of the risk involved. Risk is inherently unsettling, and adrenalin runs as we go into retreat or avoidance. But it is that same adrenalin-infused panic that makes the activity, and then the resultant learning sticks.
