Pedagogy of the Imagination

The Pedagogy of the Imagination
Tuesday, March 4, 4:00 p.m. Free

Co-sponsors: Master of Arts in Teaching/Education Program, MA Program in Cultural Production; Rose Art Museum; Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education; Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences.

Keynote address, 4:15: Michael Armstrong, author of Children Writing Stories, 2006)
Anticipated participants include Mark Auslander, Cathy Draine, Robin Dash, Dirck Roosevelt, Ellen Schattschneider, Andreas Teuber
Reception to follow.

What could happen if the profoundly human impulse to make--to build, create, conjure up, fashion, fabricate, knit, join, assemble, suppose, imagine--were drawn from the margins to the center of the educational enterprise?

Inspired by Italo Calvino's call for a "possible pedagogy of the imagination" as well as Michael Armstrong's meditations on Leo Tolstoy's radical pedagogy, this interdisciplinary symposium considers strategies for re-locating the imagination at the ehart of the educational process, rather than exiling imaginative possibilities to the periphery of teaching and learning. We explore the full range of educational endeavors, from preschool to postgraduate programs, as well as instyructional undertakings in non-western and small scale societies.

This symposium proceeds in conversation wtih the curatorial and critical work of Margaret Evangeline and Dominique Nahas, guest curators at the Rose Art Museum during Spring 2008. What models might creative undertaking in the arts suggest for integrating the operations of imagination into educational work outside of the fields of the arts as such?

Topics to be explored include ways of understanding children as active producers, and not simply consumers, of cultural form; the emerging use of "Visual Thinking Strategy" (VTS) in art museums; the development of published children's stories in African languages; and the transofrmative potentials of social service and educational partnerships between university and cummunity organizations, especially in developing community writing centers.