IRNIE Mission Statement and Goals
last modified
2008-07-22 23:35
The International Research Network on Imaginative Education (IRNIE) is a collaborative project among the IERG and national and international partners. IRNIE's mission is to generate leading research in education by developing new approaches to teaching and learning by fostering and sharing theoretical frameworks, research methods, and educational materials.
GOALS
To disseminate and promote research, theory, and practices of imaginative education.
To build research capacity by fostering collaboration in innovative research on imaginative education.
To implement and assess imaginative education projects in various cultures and educational systems.
To initiate partnerships for educational projects building on the international connections of the IERG.
To generate new ideas for research in imaginative education.
To facilitate contact and cooperation among international scholars interested in imaginative education.
To provide a framework and web site for information exchanges, professional partnerships, and "best practices" materials.
Instituting a yearly research symposium, IRNIE will bring together researchers, practitioners and scholars involved actively in various initiatives connected with imagination and education.
International Research Network on Imaginative Education
The
International Research Network on Imaginative Education (IRNIE) is
developed on the initiatives of the Imaginative Education Research
Group (IERG) at Simon Fraser University and extends the international
recognition and impact of educational research in a field where Canada
has become a global leader in recent years. IRNIE brings together
established and new researchers from across Canada and internationally
who have come to see imagination as central in some way to their
research agenda. Many of these researchers first became aware of each
other’s work through the international conferences on imagination and
education, organized in Vancouver in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 by the
IERG. Many have also been attracted to the field by the books and
articles of IERG director Kieran Egan, whose work in developing a
somewhat novel theory of education has included a distinctive line of
inquiry into the role of imagination in teaching and learning for some
30 years. Common to all, however, is the following question:
Egan’s
theory of development, elaborated most fully in The Educated Mind
(1997), offers a set of concepts and a language for describing how the
imagination expands, contracts, and changes direction as children
mature into adults in particular cultural contexts. Although the IRNIE
will remain conceptually and methodologically diverse, Egan’s theory is
likely to play a vital role in enabling researchers to communicate and
compare their findings across cultural and educational contexts.
The
International Research Network on Imaginative Education includes
partner institutions and collaborators in Australia, South America and
Mexico, Europe, and the USA. The IERG, as the “hub” of the network, is
involved in IRNIE research in three major research areas that emerged
at the first IRNIE Planning Meeting in 2006:
- imaginative curriculum and pedagogy, extending from the preschool years to high school and postsecondary education;
- imaginative
education for marginalized groups of many kinds; typically extending
beyond curriculum and pedagogy to include issues of school
organization, community involvement, power and identity; and
- imagination in teacher education and teacher development.
Cutting
across these three major research areas were a number of common needs
and objectives, which can be summarized under the headings of Theory
(diverse theoretical frameworks and languages for conceptualizing the
role of the imagination in learning and development), Research Methods
(investigating the role of the imagination in teaching and learning),
and Praxis (various tools specifically designed to inspire and support
imaginative educational practice to help bring about changes in
education on a wide scale).
