Imagination

Thoughts on Imagination

As you might imagine, we think about imagination quite a bit. While nearly everyone in education claims they want imaginative teaching and learning, you will find very little written about imagination and even less research aimed at the topic. This is largely because it is so complex or so diffuse a topic. It is certainly a concept that has had a long history, and one that provokes passionate reactions whenever it comes up in conversation. The problem, however, is that it remains poorly understood.

Here is a good example. You may have noticed on the homepage of our site a small box in the upper right corner featuring various alternating quotes on imagination. Kind visitors to our site sometimes suggest that we add to these changing quotes about imagination Einstein’s famous observation that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” One knows what he means, of course; that very knowledgeable people without imaginations tend to work fruitlessly. But that quote suggests that somehow knowledge and imagination are competitors, whereas our work is dedicated to the opposite belief. We are committed to encouraging imagination through the growth of knowledge. Ignorance is not a condition that favours imagination.

So, then, what is imagination? Well, there is a short answer and a long answer. The short answer might look like this:

Imagination is the capacity to think of things as possibly being so; it is an intentional act of mind; it is the source of invention, novelty, and generativity; it is not implicated in all perception and in the construction of all meaning; it is not distinct from rationality but is rather a capacity that greatly enriches rational thinking. The imaginative person has this capacity in a high degree. It may not be invariably true that imagination involves our image-forming capacity, but image-forming is certainly common in uses of the imagination and may in subtle ways be inevitably involved in all forms of imagining; and image-forming commonly implicates emotions.

To "imagine something is to think of it as possibly being so." The "imaginative person is one with the ability to think of lots of possibilities, usually with some richness of detail." (Alan R. White. 1990. The Language of Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.) We also like Robin Barrow's notion of imaginativeness being marked by the joint conditions of the unusual and effective.

For a very short history and a very long definition of imagination in PDF format, click here.

We are currently preparing documents from our seminars and discussions about imagination, and will mount them here in due course. Please send us your thoughts about Imagination.