Records the musings of a teacher preparing to teach a course on reading and writing in the content area to preservice secondary teachers. Notes that the teacher will trust her students to come with stories, questions, passion, and curiosity, and trust them to discover the power of literacy and to find its role in their future classrooms over time.…

Takes issue with the assumed antithesis of processes of the irrational (imagination and creativity) and those of the rational (reasoning and argumentation). Argues that numerous philosophers suggest richer ways of imagining the processes of argumentation. Explores various classroom practices that enable teachers to weave the creative and critical…

Examines how television viewing alters the way children learn and relate to their world. Describes Montessori's view of the learning process and the importance of the carefully arranged environment. Presents evidence that television interferes with learning and that reading assists the learning process. Differentiates the development of…

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of "what is" and "what if." Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for…

This article draws from the insights offered by discourse analysis and the study of gesture to examine imagination as a product of, and resource for, social action. Using data collected during ethnographic fieldwork at an architecture firm, the article explores how imagining can emerge from a group of interactants who use many semiotic media,…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…

Maternal scaffolding of pretend play was investigated in ten hearing mother/hearing child (Hh) dyads and ten hearing mother/deaf child (Hd) dyads. Three videotaped samples of play interaction were collected when the children were 28, 29 and 30 months of age. The videotapes were segmented according to four levels of maternal participation (dyadic…

Social pretend play is considered to be beneficial to literacy development. However, observations in the case study of social pretend play by a boy from the age of 3 to 5 years, showed that at this young age the children's play may also have its limitations with regard to literacy-related features. On the one hand, children create a reciprocal…

At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, representatives of the politically oppressed middle class in a politically fragmented Germany began to look to education in search for a means of emancipation, with the pedagogical concept of "Bildung" as their central focus. The attractiveness of the concept was also a…

Thomas A. Edison said, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." Well, the finalists in this year's Craftsman/NSTA Young Inventors Award Program had no shortage of imagination, but chose more useful items with which to work. With the goal to invent or modify a tool, students across the country were searching homes, yards, and…

The author of this article takes the reader on an imaginative journey on which he has invented a device he calls, the wondermeter. He then asks readers to imagine that the meter is attached to the minds of every child in the classroom. As it turns out, every child in the classroom has 3 bold ideas or original insights each day. Assuming that there…

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational,…

Background: In 2000 the so-called "Reception" class was re-conceived (in curricular terms, at least) as the second and final year of the Foundation Stage, a distinctive educational phase for children aged 3 until entry to key stage 1 at 5 or 6 years old. The "Curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage" endorses a play-based,…

In order to investigate the relationship between mental imagery and creative problem solving, a study of 44 separate accounts reporting mental imagery experiences associated with creative discoveries were examined. The data included 29 different scientists, among them Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and 9 artists, musicians, and writers,…

This book provides an overview of the creative problem-solving process and exercises to put the process the work. The illustrated, reproducible pages guide students through each step of the problem-solving process by using evaluation grids to track their ideas, solutions, and plans. The activities can be used in a variety of ways including for the…