In this article, we describe a year-long superhero storytelling project we facilitated with youth in a midwestern middle school. In this project, students read "Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spiderman," designed superhero stories set in their community, and presented artistic representations of their stories to their families and peers. We…

As a three-year-old, Margaret Katch told stories about princesses in Vivian Paley's classroom. Now deep into adulthood, she reflects on how acting out these stories as a preschooler influenced her life.

Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world.…

A lot is happening at the drawing table. Children are busy inventing stories, reassembling their thoughts, gleaning knowledge and making decisions. This article digs deep to see what is going on the children's art-making through drawing and reading comics. In an after-school drawing club the author reveals how children are transformed through…

The inability to respond to the environmental crises has been argued to stem from the crisis of imagination that underlies modernity. In response, the potentials of speculative approaches have been explored. This article presents a speculative worldmaking project conducted in a secondary school with young people. The project involved three…

This chapter amplifies student leader voices as they reflect on their involvement and growth as facilitators and participants of story circles, a structure and process for individuals to use empathy, the arts, and social imagination to support dialogue and change in local communities.

More than fifty years ago, an idea took hold in Georgia. Eventually called the Foxfire Approach, its main idea is centered around a view of a democratic classroom. Following a general sense of John Dewey's pragmatism, Eliot Wigginton invested his energy and skills into his English classroom to propel students to choose worthwhile activities. This…

As part of a lengthy lower school (K-3) project, students investigated a vintage vending machine in their Art and Technology classes, created objects to vend, built their own vending machines, and discovered many wonderful things. The uniqueness of the vending machine captured students' imaginations and propelled the project's many steps, from…

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase…

In this essay, I reflect on my lived experiences as a girl child growing up in my home country of Botswana, and also as a mother in a foreign country, Canada. I am experimenting with my personal essay and making connections with academic articles that will help me understand my behaviors, attitudes, and responses to challenging situations that…

Presenting the Montessori tools of the Great Lessons highlights the power of storytelling in teaching. Carla Foster suggests that children should be aware of how their learning increases as wonder points them to the mystery of the unknown. Engaging in the dialect of wonder during presentations can bring participants to attention by suggesting that…

We explore our experiences with roleplaying games across learning environments, chasing communal questions such as: how can teachers engage with the possibilities of roleplaying in classroom spaces, and how can we leverage such practices to open up spaces for youth to bodily experience texts, express identities, and imagine new worlds? This…

Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and…

It was week three of the first semester of the author's Master of Teaching degree at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and already lecturers were talking about first assignments. In the English method unit, students were required to write a reflective autobiographical narrative inquiring into particular critical incidents from past…

Orators of folk literature and nursery rhymes entertain, inform, and persuade their audiences through the straightforward plots in those genres. Because nursery rhymes recitations usually happen in groups, they help children acquire the mechanics of oral communication and promote communal bonding. Although nursery rhymes have a simpler form than…