The latest article to be published in The Bridge Journal of Educational Research and Theory.

Here we are at the beginning of another school year and here at The Bridge we are pleased to share the latest article to be published in The Bridge Journal of Educational Research and Theory. In a thought-provoking exploration of the elusive nature of engagement, Gillian Judson, Robin Ulster and James D. suggest that “the emotional and cognitive dimensions of engagement often lie within the elusive realm of what educators can’t see.” Equally inspiring is the nature of their professional collaboration. Well worth the read!

 

A Collaborative Exploration of Engagement in Teaching and Learning:

Imagination, Wonder, and a #2 Pencil

James Denby, Common Sense
Gillian Judson, PhD Simon Fraser University
Robin Ulster, University of the People

Abstract

This article provides a glimpse into our trans-Atlantic conversations, curiosities, and questions about the notion of ‘engagement’. Specifically, we interrogate meanings and practices of engagement and wonder in learning and consider how depth of knowledge and emotion contribute to these educational goals. Framing and inspiring our conversation is an imagination-focused pedagogy called Imaginative Education that led us to meet years ago and that has infused our teaching, learning, and pedagogical conversations ever since. We hope this scholarly and conversational offering challenges readers to consider a radical re-imagining of common classroom practices and to think more about the elusive emotional and imaginative dimensions of engagement.

Keywords

engagement, imagination, Imaginative Education, cognitive tools, wonder

A Collaborative Exploration of Engagement in Teaching and Learning:

Imagination, Wonder, and a #2 Pencil

This collaborative work is rooted in our shared interest in teaching, imagination, and critically examining often unexplored pedagogical practices. We are post-secondary teacher educators currently living in Spain (James and Robin) and Canada (Gillian), connecting through lively Zoom discussions. By imagination we mean the ability to envision and enact the possible; the generative feature of mind that enables an access to the not yet (Judson, 2020). An imagination-focused pedagogy called Imaginative Education is the topic that first caused our storylines to cross and is a lens through which we often view education.

This article offers a triadic glimpse into our conversations, curiosities and questions about ‘engagement’ in learning and some dimensions of this topic that we consider pedagogically significant. We invite you, the reader, to consider how you understand ‘engagement’ and ‘wonder’ and how depth of knowledge and emotion contribute to these educational goals. To begin we introduce Imaginative Education, a unique pedagogy that considers the practical dimensions of the human imagination and how to maximize it to support learning. We hope the scholarly conversations we share here invite you to think more deeply about engagement and its connection to imagination, to wonder, to emotion, and to depth of knowledge.

Imaginative Education (IE): A Lens for Understanding Engagement

Kieran Egan was an educational philosopher who spent his career studying the role of imagination in human development. His work is a powerful lens through which to understand dimensions of ‘engagement’ in learning. In his seminal work, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding, Egan (1997) asserts that the emotional, metaphoric, and imaginative worlds created by the possibilities of language are the “foundations of our cultural life” (Egan, 1997, p. 69). According to Egan, language offer tools—cognitive tools—that engage and grow the imagination. Examples of cognitive tools include the story-form, vivid mental imagery, change of context, metaphors, dramatic tension and more.  Imaginative Education is a theory and practice that indicates how to use cognitive tools to shape emotionally and imaginatively engaging learning for students of all ages. The three conversations that follow offer glimpses into IE theory and practice and what it can teach us all about engagement and learning. (While it is outside the scope of this article to describe in detail how IE foregrounds students’ emotional and imaginative engagement in learning, you can learn more on a blog dedicated to IE practices called imaginED ( www.educationthatinspires.ca) or the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education (CIRCE) website (www.circe-sfu.ca))

Searching For Keys Under the Lamppost (Robin)

As a long-time teacher and teacher-educator, I feel disheartened by the number of pre-service and new teachers who rely on apps and websites like Chat GPT and Twinkl to find ideas and lessons to ‘engage’ their students. Many of our pre-service teachers create what are essentially personalized worksheets in the belief that they will keep students motivated and involved in learning.  Along with some of their classroom mentor-teachers, they require students to make their thinking visible throughout a lesson to determine whether they are engaged in the lessons. They close their lessons with plenaries or sharing circles that include informal assessment routines such as exit tickets to determine whether their students have been ‘engaged’ and, hopefully, as a result, have met learning outcomes.

These same pre-service teachers frequently express frustration that their students do not understand, have no idea what to do, fail quizzes, or aren’t able to participate in a discussion because, even a day after their lesson, the students don’t remember what they’d supposedly ‘learned’.  This begs the question: Were they ever ‘engaged’ in the activities? Does ‘engaged’ necessarily result in learning? They, like many of us, are trying to figure out why and how their teaching strategies are not creating curious and imaginatively-engaged students who are making important learning connections and demonstrating higher-level thinking. From my experience, I think we may be failing to understand—and ‘see’—key features of ‘engagement’.

On Engagement

While student ‘success’ is a complex process, engagement is increasingly seen as a contributing factor. Research suggests that when students are engaged, they will be more likely to attend class regularly, to stay in school, to earn high grades, to graduate from college, and to have more meaningful career options (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2021; Macfarlane & Tomlinson, 2017). Student engagement is also seen as a way to prevent negative classroom behaviours and promote actions and attitudes that are conducive for learning (Macfarlane & Tomlinson, 2017).

Most educational research articles define engagement as incorporating emotional, cognitive, and behavioural dimensions (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2021; Macfarlane & Tomlinson, 2017; Student Engagement, 2016). Emotional and cognitive dimensions of engagement are commonly defined as involving positive affect towards learning and topics, and students understanding the emotional importance or significance of what they are learning. Students’ feel something about the topics and these feelings may help them remember and/or inspire them to learn more. Imaginative Education practice supports this kind of engagement. Learning that employs cognitive tools cultivates emotional connections with knowledge (Egan, 1997, 2002).

Much of the literature about student engagement directed towards a teacher audience, however, is focused on the behavioural aspect, describing what engagement looks and sounds like in the classroom. As an example, the Edutopia article entitled, How Do We Know When Students Are Engaged?, is just one of many that identifies paying attention, taking notes, listening, asking/responding to questions, completing requests and reacting appropriately, as ways to tell that students are engaged (Johnson, 2012).

In my experience, seeking to assess engagement largely through a behavioural lens is problematic for many reasons, especially because the engagement behaviours educators can see don’t necessarily indicate that students are emotionally or cognitively connected to their learning. Emotional and cognitive dimensions of engagement often lie within the elusive realm of what educators can’t see. So, when students demonstrate ‘engagement behaviours’ such as participating in an activity, or filling out worksheets and exit tickets correctly, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily learning more, remembering what they’ve learned, or participating in deeper forms of learning (Axelson & Flick, 2011).

I wonder if we are missing out on engaging students’ imaginations, their sense of curiosity, and their desire to learn when we rely heavily on behavioural forms of engagement and on quick formative assessment games and exercises. It may be that we are looking to observable and visible places, when the key to engagement lies out of view. Writing about why imagination tends not to be the focus of much research, Egan, Judson & Madej (2015) offer an analogy I find compelling:

The value of engaging the imagination in learning is not something that has been enlightened by empirical research, and there is always a tendency to focus attention on those things we find easier to research. This is the phenomenon of looking on the sidewalk under the bright lamppost for the keys that were actually lost in the deep grass out of the light. But imagination and creativity are crucially important elements in education, and to continue to give them less attention than they merit is to persist in the folly of futile searching for keys under the lamppost. (Egan, Judson & Madej, 2015, p. viii).

I feel like relying on observable behavioural aspects of engagement is akin to looking for the keys under the spotlight. However, it may be that the most powerful features of engagement are out of view. While formative assessment and visible-thinking strategies are useful tools to help students verbalize and understand what they are learning, how they are learning, and to guide instructional decisions, I wonder how we can search also ‘in the darkness’, into the emotional and cognitive dimensions of engagement. A spark of curiosity, the emotional feelings cultivated in a good story, the subtle ways in which students lean in to learning—how can we acknowledge these valuable signs of engagement and enable them in our teaching?

As teacher-educators, we (Robin and James) are motivated and excited by the task of helping the student-teachers we work with learn how to engage their students’ curiosity, imaginations, and emotions. We have seen the ways in which the theories and practice of Imaginative Education inspire students’ desires to learn, to make connections between what they are learning, to think critically, and to ask bigger questions about the world. Imaginative Education offers the possibility of engaging students, not only behaviourally, but, more specifically, engaging students’ imaginations, emotions and sense of wonder with any subject or topic that they are learning about. For example, on teaching punctuation, Egan (1997) writes,

Our sense of wonder might be readily engaged by the discrepancy between the invention of these tiny marks and their vast social and cultural consequences—a little like chaos theory’s example of the movement of a butterfly’s wing in South America leading to profound changes in weather conditions in the northern hemisphere. (p. 256)

Teaching something in this way and thereby igniting a flame of interest or a feeling of curiosity is very different from simply giving students a cute worksheet that involves a punctuation quest or giving them a punctuation and full stops board game to play.

And this brings us back to looking for the keys under the lamppost: engaging the imagination in learning may not be something that can be measured or quantified. This does not mean that it is not important. We want to expand understanding in education about assessment, about lesson planning, and about classroom community with theoretical and practical knowledge of imagination and its role in engagement. We are hoping to find ways to encourage teachers (student teachers and experienced teachers) to expand their search for keys to ‘engagement’ beyond the light of the lamppost. In the next two sections Gillian and James expand this conversation on engagement to look at the connections between wonder, students, and student-teachers in practice.

Re-Imagining the Know/Wonder/Learn Approach: KWL(W) 2.0 (By Gillian)

I, Gillian, want to pick up a particular aspect of ‘engagement’ Robin introduces above: wonder. Specifically, I seek to illuminate how limited conceptions of ‘wonder’ leave this tool of engagement largely unused. As an example, I will focus specifically on a pedagogical activity familiar within the elementary classroom context. The ‘Know/Wonder/Learn’ (KWL) approach is as common in elementary school classrooms as (little) chairs, circle time, ‘show and tell’, and hands-on learning. I want to think more about this common pedagogical activity and, ultimately, reveal how it both reflects a particular (and mostly unexamined) view about student learning and leaves the power of the ‘w’ (wonder) untapped. Read on to consider the limitations and possibilities of KWL.

Noticing the Waters We Swim In

As an assessment tool, the KWL activity—often written in columns on a whiteboard or on student handouts—aims to show educators what students ‘know’, what they want to know, or ‘wonder’, and then what they eventually ‘learn’. KWL reflects the common—and largely unquestioned—progressivist belief that educators can best support learning by connecting to students’ prior knowledge. It seems to assume (or hope) that asking questions, or wondering about what to learn, can engage student interest. This is considered a student-centred practice, meeting students where they are, allowing educators to connect learning to what students already know, revealing students’ interest and, ideally, directing a program of inquiry. I invite you to rethink the ‘W’—wonder—with me. Through the lens of imagination, ‘wonder’ can involve far more than asking questions that reflect curiosity.

Interrogating and Rethinking “Wonder”

While there is obvious value in assessing what students understand and may be curious (wonder) about at the start of learning, conceptualizing ‘wonder’ only in this way is limiting. First, when used at the start of the learning process and when ‘I wonder if/why/how’ is synonymous with ‘I am curious if/why/how’, students’ questions come from a limited knowledge base. As a result, students’ interest can tend to point to familiar aspects of a topic, rather than the unfamiliar. Without knowledge, it can be hard to move past superficial dimensions toward the juicy bits, that is, to the intriguing mysteries, puzzles or awe-inspiring aspects. (The important relationship between engagement and knowledge is taken up further, next, with James and his description of the #2 pencil. Read on!) These initial ‘I/we wonder’ questions are also assumed to reflect student interest or engagement in a topic. Because they tend to point to the familiar, rather than the extraordinary, unique or interesting, however, I am not so sure students are necessarily interested or engaged.

It would be wise to rethink ‘wonder’. We can think about wonder not only in the sense of ‘I am curious’ but in recognition that everything in the world aspires to greatness in some way. Everything can evoke awe; everything is awe-full. Wonder conceived in this different way is one of the powerful cognitive tools, or learning tools, that engages imagination and makes knowledge meaningful and memorable (Egan, 1997, 2005).

Wonder Grows Imagination

Kieran Egan (1997, 2005) describes ‘a sense of wonder’ as a powerful cognitive or learning tool that engages and grows imagination. Egan argues that evoking a sense of wonder’ in learning involves understanding how something is unique, awe-inspiring, or calls to possibility. A sense of wonder reveals the marvel in a topic. A sense of wonder is one of many different learning tools—or cognitive tools, that makes knowledge more meaningful and memorable by engaging our emotion. Rather than starting from what students know, Egan recommends shaping learning opportunities around what they can imagine, or what is possible. So, educators can invite students to explore the extremes and limits of topics, the mysteries, the puzzles, the dramatic tensions and more. Practically, educators can use cognitive tools of Imaginative Education—playful exploration, powerful images, metaphor, or the story-form and many others—to shape topics early on and throughout the learning process. A sense of wonder is a powerful tool educators can use to invite students to lean into new topics, revealing the unique, cool, unusual aspects about it. Importantly, a sense of wonder can develop for learners through the learning process. When human beings surpass the familiar aspects of a topic by learning more about it, they gain access to the unique, novel or unfamiliar qualities and dimensions. It might be wise, therefore, to rethink KWL.

A Radical Move: KWLW

What if you add another ‘W’ to your KWL practice to maximize your students’ engagement? What if you tap into aspects of their imaginative lives, not just their immediate lives?  What if your students seek what is inspiring, unusual, and unique about a topic and include that in their learning? Adding a second ‘W’ to the infamous KWL practice may be considered a small act of rebellion—revolt against a particular way of thinking about learning, student interest etc. It shifts how we discuss wonder, noticing that engagement and learning are not necessarily maximized when we only move from students’ immediate lives slowly outward. It can make visible how lack of knowledge can limit our questions—do students ask better questions at the end of an inquiry than at the beginning? I hope so! It shows how ‘wonder’ can mean different things and how limiting “wonder” to initial questions, leaves engagement untapped. Rethinking wonder means seeing every topic as coming to life; everything aspiring to greatness. Even a #2 pencil.

What does a #2 pencil have to do with being an engaging and effective teacher? (By James)

Not too long ago in our course Teaching and Learning in Upper Primary, we, James and Robin, presented our Year 3 and Year 4 teacher education students with a simple #2 pencil – you know, the old fashioned ones with yellow paint and a little eraser at the end – and asked them to brainstorm what they would have to do to make a box of pencils themselves.

“Get some wood.”

“Get some paint.”

“Get some…I’m not sure what it is. Pencil lead?”

We pushed them to think deeper with questions like “Where would you get the wood?”; “What would you do to the wood to make it into a pencil?”; and “What exactly is that ‘lead’ made of?”

We were beginning a social studies unit in which they would learn about urban societies and then work with that content to refine how they would teach it. The pencil was our entry point to examine the complexity of urban societies—the trade networks, infrastructure, governance structures, record-keeping, etc.—and the systems they rely on to function. The process of modelling this start to a social studies unit revealed a significant challenge in preparing our pre-service teachers to dive into concepts and relationships in their future classrooms – their own lack of content knowledge.

A typical Ticonderoga #2 pencil is the product of an Italian multinational; yours could be made in Italy, France, Mexico or Germany with components (wood, graphite, etc.) sourced from multiple countries. Pencils are possible because our society divides labour, creates specialized systems, and builds infrastructure to help society run—just like the great city of Ur in Mesopotamia, the pyramids of the Aztecs, or the trade networks of the Romans. Exploring the pencil was an introduction to understanding the complexity of urban societies—both ancient and modern.

While knowledge of how a pencil is produced isn’t essential for Year 3 and 4 teacher education students, we discovered a glaring gap as they began to plan how they would have their own students learn about urban civilizations. Most initially focused on finding websites to research ‘key information’ for different early urban societies—e.g. who the Inca traded with, what the Mesopotamians built, etc. This reduced the potential conceptual learning to a set of facts–the who, what, where, when, for example, of trade—rather than the vastly more important understanding of what a trade network represents, including:

• Specialized labour
• Spread of ideas
• Organizational structures (e.g. to regulate trade)
• Infrastructure
• Monumental architecture
• Surplus and accumulation

Besides these concepts, each of which is integral to understanding how a successful urban society functions or fails, our pre-service teachers didn’t address the remarkable pattern that ancient and modern urban societies (‘civilizations’) share common characteristics that in many cases emerged independently. The trade networks and monuments of the Inca, for example, emerged with no contact between them and other urban societies like the Roman Empire.  The humble pencil represents that complexity which is why we couldn’t help but laugh when the initial class answer to the question, “Could you make your own pencil?” was, “Yeah, probably but it might take some time to get all the stuff.”

When it came time to plan their own unit, our students’ initial work reflected their beliefs of what good teachers do. They saw themselves as coaches and had students do independent research to then collaborate on a final project. They believed that this was the way children would build understanding, knowledge and expertise and that this self-directed approach would foster deep engagement. This approach to learning, however, would have neglected fascinating conceptual exploration and thinking about systems and patterns. It might have met curricular requirements, but it would have failed to engage students’ sense of wonder and imagination. Why?

Content As Springboard to Learning and Engagement

These eager, committed teachers-to-be were hamstrung by their own lack of content knowledge. Gaps in their knowledge prevented them from imagining the complexity of the pencil and therefore really understanding the essential elements of early and modern urban societies. While the task they created was student-centred and active it only scratched the surface of potential learning. Without content knowledge, they were severely constrained in their ability to ask good questions, nudge students towards deep understandings and envision connections between concepts. When we speak of ‘guides on the side’, we envision a teacher who can guide students not in simply completing a task but rather in constructing meaning and building a foundation for learning. What these pre-service teachers didn’t know confined them to being the ‘guide on the side’ for a task that, while student-centred and active, only scratched the surface of potential learning. Gaps in their knowledge prevented them from imagining the complexity of the pencil and therefore really understanding the essential elements of early and modern urban societies.

Our students’ initial attempts to design learning experiences are not surprising. While curricula have supposedly been embracing inquiry, they have been focusing more and more on the ‘concrete’—what students already know and what is familiar. For a group of children to appreciate the marvel that a pencil really is—and to see it as a gateway to understanding the world – we must move away from the teacher as a simple guide pointing students towards learning outcomes and value knowledge/content as a springboard to deep learning. In a text entitled Getting It Wrong from the Beginning Egan (2002) argues that children often “do not learn the prerequisites to later learning, and this…has an impoverishing effect on students’ abilities to learn throughout their schooling” (p. 143). This is equally true of teachers.

The idea of students developing knowledge and expertise while collaboratively engaged in self-directed learning about topics and issues related to their own lives and community is nothing if not beautiful. But we would argue that without significant teacher knowledge and expertise, for the vast majority of students, the learning will be ‘flat’ and fail to engage learners. For the teacher to be a successful coach or guide, for students to successfully explore the concepts and theories that underlie any topic (even a pencil), the teacher has to know ‘stuff’.

The Value of ‘Stuff’ in Fostering Engagement and Wonder

Understanding the value of this ‘stuff’ and the role it can play in the classroom is easier if we also understand Egan’s cognitive tools within the framework of Imaginative Education. For the sake of brevity, we will take only three, but first and foremost is that a

mass of diverse knowledge is necessary to drive the dialectical process between general scheme and particular knowledge, and a good deal more knowledge is required to keep it going. When students accumulate only a relatively small amount of knowledge…they are able to generate only rather crude and simple general schemes. (Egan, 1997, p.130)

This was evident in our student-teachers’ initial project ideas as their students would have been searching for simple facts (e.g., the Mesopotamians traded for lapis lazuli) rather than analyzing and understanding concepts about urban societies’ development. The evolution of urban societies is, moreover, a potential vehicle for both provoking student engagement and deep learning. On a simple level, the making of a pencil and the mind-bogglingly complex network that makes it possible “seem[s] best able to stimulate the sense of wonder or…awe” (p.218) —much more so than ‘it’s made of wood from _____ and paint from _____’ (the equivalent factoids emphasized in our students’ initial unit plans).

Egan uses a lesson approach to teaching “properties of air” to illustrate how content can provoke wonder, noting that “air is full of noises…of waves and particles, smells, living things, and decayed flakes of skin. If we could just change the scale of things…of empty, featureless air we could show children that the air is full of wonders” (p. 245) These wonders are all around us—in pencils, Mesopotamian networks, in Incan infrastructure—and the teacher’s role in unlocking those wonders rests on a foundation of knowledge. Only by ‘knowing stuff’ can the teacher open a path for students to inquire, explore, and build a meaningful understanding of the world around them.

Conclusion

Our foray into engagement has made us realize a few things. First, the scope of the literature reveals its importance to educators. We also realize, through reading, discussion and our own personal experiences, how the goal of ‘engagement’ is not always achieved. This brings us back to where our story started: Imaginative Education. The topic that led to our meeting emerges for us as a powerful pedagogical frame for learning more about engaging students and (student-)teachers. We are left wondering about how we can expand conversations around engagement to more fully acknowledge the role of emotion and imagination and what is required to cultivate both. Something we haven’t discussed here is the connection between a teacher’s engagement and student engagement. In a world of AI-generated ‘hooks’, how do teachers cultivate their emotional and imaginative connections with the topics they are teaching? For students, how can we as educators continue to nurture personal and long-lasting connections in a fast-paced media-driven world?

References

Axelson, R. D., & Flick, A. (2011). Engagement. Retrieved from:

http://nur655sect2jan12teama.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/50933853/defining%20student%20engagement.pdf

Cents-Boonstra, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Denessen, E., Aelterman, N., & Haerens, L. (2021).

Fostering student engagement with motivating teaching: an observation study of teacher and student behaviours. Research Papers in Education, 36(6), 754–779. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2020.1767184

Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind how cognitive tools shape our understanding. University of

Chicago Press.

Egan, K. (2002). Getting it wrong from the beginning. Yale University Press.

Egan, K., Judson, G. & Madej, K. (Eds.) (2015). Engaging imagination and developing creativity in education. Cambridge Scholars Press.

Johnson, B. (2012). How do we know when students are engaged? Edutopia.

Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-engagement-definition-ben-johnson

Judson, G. (2020). Conceptualizing imagination in the context of school leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 27(1), 72-84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2020.1818289

‌‌Macfarlane, B., & Tomlinson, M. (2017). Critiques of student engagement. Higher Education

Policy, 30(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0027-3

Student Engagement (2016). The Glossary of Education Reform. Retrieved from:

https://www.edglossary.org/student-engagement/#google_vignette