This essay places David Graeber's consistent focus on imagination and possibilities into conversation with social studies education. In a sociopolitical climate characterized by neoliberalism, militarized borders, and political censorship of social studies teaching and learning in P-12 schools, it is crucial that social studies teachers and…

Critical reflection on the curriculum offered in the Catholic school is a valuable addition to wider dialogue on the nature of education and schooling. It enables the Church's educational agencies to offer a distinctive vision of education to the diverse range of students who freely participate in its educational ventures. In Catholic thinking,…

As we design increasingly complex systems, we run up against fundamental limitations of human imagination. To support practice, it becomes essential to use authentic data and algorithms as design materials to augment designers' intuitions. Recent work has explored some dimensions of using data as a design material, suggesting the contours of a new…

Many have observed that the curriculum is a mile wide and scarcely an inch deep. This article provides a rationale for including in-depth study of a place-based/local topic within educational programs aimed at cultivating ecological understanding. Following a brief exploration of some of the obstacles to in-depth learning, it describes the ways in…

This paper utilizes the work of Elise Boulding as a theoretical framework for analyzing the potentials and shortcomings of the US educational policy, "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB). The interrelated concepts of respect, solitude, imagination, and partnerships from Boulding's scholarship are detailed. NCLB is summarized along…

Describes a curriculum matrix embodying three elements (purpose, substance, practice) and their various dimensions. Argues for a transcendent view of mathematics as a profoundly human, spiritual, astonishing, majestic, and powerful enterprise. Outlines seven mathematical ideas that have transformed human experience by celebrating unlimited freedom…

The ways in which the mind creates new worlds, new contexts, and possible alternate realities are described. It is proposed that with this information, facility in devising new worlds and realities may be enhanced and imaginative reach expanded. (MSE)

Educators need to expand their ideas concerning acceptable ways to express knowledge. By restricting students to traditional ways of expression and evaluation, teachers may be preventing them from fully exploring and displaying their knowledge. Students' artwork can provide teachers with an additional way to evaluate learners' understandings of…

Brains are biological, but minds are cultural achievements. What really counts in schools is teaching children the excitement of exploring ideas, helping youngsters formulate their own problems and resolution strategies, developing multiple literacy forms, imparting the importance of wonder, creating a sense of community, and recognizing each…

This paper calls for an alternative view of educational policy, a departure from the macroperspective currently dominating policy analysis. The latter perspective tends to focus on policy development and implementation issues of politics and control, compliance and measurement, and relationship structures and influences among groups and actors.…

The existential contexts of education reach far beyond the conceptions of Goals 2000 or the appalling actualities of family breakdown, homelessness, violence, and other "savage inequalities." Classroom encounters with the arts can move the young to imagine, extend, and renew. If the arts' significance for growth, inventiveness, and…

Creative projects, whether in the arts, literature, or social aspects of education, demand a mixture of the "subconscious" (imaginative) and "intellectual" (rational), not the rejection of one in favor of the other. Rationality and imagination are complementary in speculative research. An advocacy approach may be appropriate in certain cases. (20…

Since vision, imagination, and a passion for justice are in short supply, educators must transcend traditional technical/rational approaches and create space for artists' prophetic voices to emerge. Empowering the voices of imagination through the arts will help renew the metaphysical dimension of educators' work. (27 references) (MLH)

Explores the type of school construction suitable for instruction that includes lectures, experiment, and creation. The philosophical bases of a triadic approach to learning that appeals to feeling, rationality, and imagination are considered. Four detailed diagrams portraying the author's concepts are included. (Contains four references.) (KRN)

This paper examines the place of reading in the acquisition of information capability among young people and considers the extent to which this is nurtured and aided by works of the imagination, whether in print or electronic form. Information capability presupposes a range of skills that, in addition to technological skills and the knowledge to…