Welcome to the Imaginative Education Research Group
We are a group of researchers, teachers, graduate students, parents, and others who would like to make education more effective. To achieve this aim we have developed theories, principles, and practices designed to explain, describe, and exemplify our new approach to educating. This website is designed to introduce you to these theories, principles, and practical techniques. We call this new approach Imaginative Education (IE) because engaging students’ imaginations in learning, and teachers’ imaginations in teaching, seems to us crucial to making knowledge in the curriculum vivid and meaningful to students. Our work is dedicated to showing how this can be done routinely in everyday classrooms and at home.
The IERG was founded in 2001 in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. Since that time we have grown to include active associates in many countries around the world. We conduct research, publish, prepare print and video materials that demonstrate IE in action, organize an annual conference, put on workshops, design modules for use in teacher education and literacy programs, and much else.
Ultimately we want to help bring about a change in the way schooling is conceived, organized and practiced worldwide. The change we want to bring about may be broadly summarized as a transition from an industrial age school system to a post-industrial system: from a system that attempts to squeeze people and thoughts into standardized boxes, often to the detriment of originality and adaptability, to a system that enables the unusual and effective to flourish wherever possible.
Below we will include some links to various materials that will tell you a bit more about our aims and ideas.