Prior work suggests that imagining helping others increases prosocial intentions and behavior toward those individuals. But is this true for everyone, or only for those who tend toward--or away from--helping more generally? The current study (N = 283) used an imagined helping paradigm and a battery of behavioral and self-report measures of trait…

Over the years, a small industry has sprung up dedicated to preserving writers' homes and birthplaces, offering the chance to see first-hand the circumstances under which their key texts were written. Experiencing an insight into, say, Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, or Hardy's Wessex cottage, or the Bronte parsonage in Haworth, is widely held to be an…

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.

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…

While the manifestation of a revival of a collective revolutionary imaginary is more pronounced in social movements, we see it evidenced in a renewed interested in utopian curriculum and pedagogy. This article advances this trend by following José Esteban Muñoz's methodology, returning an early Paulo Freire formulation of utopian pedagogy as a…

This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato's classical critique of narrative and imitative art in "The Republic," especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates's and Glaucon's most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between…

The insistence on knowledge accumulation in modern educational discourses has led to the formation of exclusive dichotomies in various forms, most tangibly observable in the division of people into 'knowledgeable' and 'unknowledgeable'. What underlies this dichotomy is a conception of rationality based on which knowledge is seen as an 'instrument'…

Acknowledging that students are civic actors and that teaching and learning is always relevant to civic lives, this article addresses how imaginative spaces can be political and if the ways that educators dream and speculate with youth have civic implications. The author first considers how communities and nations are shaped by sociopolitical…

The present article aims to estimate the value of language learning through a quick review of the learning process and with a focus on "accumulated knowledge" and "the ability to learn." Following the opinions of researchers and linguists, we can also argue that the whole history of human culture--"of intelligence and…

This study aims to bridge a gap between Vygotsky's seminal framework on the importance of make-believe play and adult scaffolding in children's cognitive development (e.g. executive function [EFs]) and research in cognitive neuroscience. Kindergarten children (N = 160) and teachers (N = 12) took part in the study. EFs skills and make-believe play…

The "consensual assessment technique" (CAT) represents one of the most popular evaluation techniques used by researchers to assess creative artifacts. In this paper we discuss how the prototypical use of the CAT, while useful for identifying unambiguous examples of creative artifacts, can inadvertently kill the curiosity of researchers…

In this article, I discuss how the principle of exemplarity developed in the 1970s by the Marxist educators and theorists Oskar Negt and Knud Illeris can be a model for a deliberative curriculum. Today's crisis-ridden discourses of 'taking back', 'reclaiming', etc., the practices and purposes of the university are evidence of a widespread…

This article describes my tumultuous journey as a course instructor and researcher investigating imagination in an educational leadership graduate seminar. I employ an arts-based pedagogy and research methodology known as Performative Inquiry. Sharing my experiences delivering this course informs my future teaching and can support colleagues…

This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism…

Young children engage in multimodal written expression. The research in this study explores the spaces that were created, and the stories created by children in an after-school comic club. The club utilized the Writer's Workshop model to support the Being a Writer program that is used in the Ocean View School District (Ocean View School District…