IERG – Imaginative Education

From 2001-2015, the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG) was dedicated to showing how learners’ imaginations can be routinely engaged in everyday classrooms. The group was founded by Kieran Egan. His vision has inspired thousands of teachers all over the world to reflect upon their daily practices and embrace this new approach to effective education.

The IERG worked to introduce new theories, principles, and practical techniques for making education more effective. Because engaging students’ imaginations in learning, and teachers’ imaginations in teaching, is crucial to making knowledge in the curriculum vivid and meaningful, we call this new approach Imaginative Education (IE). We show that the imagination is one of the great workhorses of learning, and how it can be used for all ages and skill levels.

While the IERG is no longer active, IE is being developed and the work of the IERG continued through CIRCE–the Centre For Imagination In Research, Culture & Education.

All the knowledge in the curriculum is a product of someone’s hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. If we want students to learn that knowledge in a manner that will make it meaningful and memorable, then we need to bring it to life for them in the context of those hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. The great agent that will allow us to achieve this routinely in everyday classrooms is the imagination.