Fostering Imagination in Higher Education : discipline and professional practices /
Joy Whitton
- New York : Routledge, 2018.
- xiv, 228p.
- Routledge Research in Higher Education .
Includes Index
"Fostering Imagination in Higher Education" is a book that investigates the role of imagination in teaching and learning in non-arts disciplines, arguing that imagination and creative teaching approaches are essential across all higher education fields. The book presents four ethnographic stories from physics, history, finance, and pharmaceutical science courses, where educators employ various strategies to encourage their students' imagination, and examines how students experience learning when it focuses on engaging their imagination.
The study is framed by Ricoeur's work on different forms of imagination, linking imaginative thinking to cognitive science, philosophy, disciplinary concepts, and social-cultural practices. The book argues that a lack of clarity about what imagination looks like in higher education impedes teachers in fostering their students' creativity. However, by fostering imagination, students can learn to create themselves as knowledge producers and professionals, actively experiencing the constructed nature of the knowledge and processes they are learning to use. The book suggests that models, graphs, strategies, and artifacts are tools that can help take learners' thinking forward and offer new understandings of pedagogy in higher education.
Overall, the book argues that imaginative thinking is elemental to the goals of higher education, regardless of discipline, and highlights the importance of encouraging creativity in students to produce new knowledge and explore the continuing potential of knowledge to be remade in the future.