The book Engaging Imagination is a useful corollary to our course, Applied Imagination. Interestingly, one of the co-authors, Alison James, taught for eleven years at an UAL school, London College of Fashion. It is “about finding ways to increase the number of imaginative moments that students encounter in contemporary classrooms” (p.4) through engaging with multiple modalities of learning. Particularly as we are into the Reflective Practice segment of the course, this book is challenging the hegemony of the written representations of learning. Ironically, I’m going to write about it, though it has inspired me to engage in other forms of reflective practice for myself as well as encourage classmates into different forms as well.
One of the benefits of including other forms of reflections, like poetry, artwork, music, video, collage, graphics, drama, and dance in students’ practices shifts the spotlight from the idea of “getting something done” form of instrumentalism, to imagination, creativity, and play. This reflects a feminist emphasis on affirmative and connected modes of knowing.
They emphasize that it’s important for teachers to model through example methods of reflective thinking. “Any time we model a demonstration of a particular technique we can conduct a quick self-evaluation of our performance in front of the students and strive to identify what we think we did well and what we felt could have been improved on. Having done this, we can open up the discussion for reactions to our critique from the class” (p.34).
There’s an emphasis on emotional intelligence as a core aspect of creativity and imagination. By engaging with different forms of reflection, the limbic system of the brain can take over rather than the rational left brain. In ambiguous or fluid situations, especially with other people, the limbic system comes into usage. “The fluid ability to read multiple emotional cues and to exercise a meta-awareness of one’s own somatic body states and the chains of reasoning that flow from these is strongly correlated with success in working as a change agent” (p.48-49).
The authors think that it’s essential to arrange opportunities for students to pay attention to how emotions, soul, and feelings intersect with learning.
Another element of reflective thinking that is emphasized is identity and how community influences identity and so is an essential part of reflectivity. “Identity is, in important ways, socially created in groups and communities of peers” (p.85). Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice (1998) is heavily referenced and is a book I have been leaning on as well as a foundational text in thinking about communities and education. Quoting Wenger, they say “participating in communities is a complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person, including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations” (p.186).
It makes me appreciate how community can be incorporated into classroom thinking as another layer to acknowledge and reflect on.
Final-year students in any discipline are nearing the end of a sustained course of study, and it is entirely appropriate that one of the goals for that year would be to help them understand what communities of practice they have been members of during their studies. It is also important that they start to think about future community memberships that they may join when they enter the world of work. One way to get students to identify the many possible communities within their landscapes of practice is to have them plot out in diagrammatic or symbolic form their community memberships and the territories and overlapping terrains in which these are located. In drawing these maps, students are asked to indicate the ingenious ways in which they steer a course through the communities and terrains that overlap.
-P. 188
I think this unpacking of meaning and engagement across multiple modalities and axis is helpful to me in pedagogically understanding what I perceive as shortcomings in our own course and how that leads to frustration at the continued emphasis on traditional methods of learning and only on individual learning journeys without acknowledging how important communities and exchange are.
My individual project asking how can structured cross-disciplinary exchange be supported at CSM? is looking structurally at the school system, but grew out of frustrations with the insularity of the course itself. For a course that is rooting multi-disciplinarity at its core, I was startled by the lack of connections with other disciplines in the programme and university. Using imagination can happen anywhere. To be sparked, we need more engagement with more different methods, with somatics and the body, with more disciplines, and more exposure to new ideas and ways of doing things.