Al James - 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)

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This book is a tale of two coffees. It had its origins in a London caf 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 learningvisual and verbal, kinesthetic and cognitive, online and off-line, solo study and group work, large and small numbers of studentsand 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?