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Keynote Address & Plenary Sessions
Click on the names below to view an abstract of the presentations that will be made by our invited presenters.
Elliot Eisner (Keynote Speaker)
Steve Bell
Clyde Coreil
Cedric Cullingford
Kieran Egan
Maria do Ceu Roldao
Elliot W. Eisner (eisner@eisner.pobox.stanford)
Keynote Address: Images at the Core of Education
Dr. Eisner’s address will describe the qualitative character of images and how they provide direction and value to human activity. It will discuss the origin of images, their role in thinking, and their influence on what we notice and understand. It will also address the role of images in education.
Dr. Elliot W. Eisner is professor of education and art at Stanford University, where he has been in 1965, and is renown for his scholarship in three fields: arts education, curriculum studies, and educational evaluation. His research interests focus on the development of aesthetic intelligence and the use of critical methods from the arts in studying and improving educational practice. Dr. Eisner has lectured throughout the world and has published more than 15 books, including Educating Artistic Vision, The Educational Imagination, and The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award from the American Educational Research Association, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Dr. Eisner has served as president of the National Art Education Association, the International Society for Education through Art, the American Research Association, and is currently president-elect of the John Dewey Society.
Steve Bell (steve@storyline-scotland.freeserve.co.uk)
Plenary Session: Storyline: A Strategy for Exciting Learning
Storyline is a structure which allows teachers to design a plan which integrates learning and makes it relevant to the students. First, a story is created or selected which identifies characters, time, and setting. Key questions are created by the teacher with the intention of discovering the existing knowledge of the learners. The learners then create visuals of the characters and the setting. The paradox here is that although the teacher has control of the story, the students feel ownership of it. Finally, the students suggest solutions to problems that arise or incidents that might happen in the story. The Storyline approach gives a structure and a meaning to designing curriculum which allows teachers to feel professional and to enjoy their teaching while at the same time the learners feel secure in working within the context of the story.
Steve Bell, from Glasgow, Scotland, comes to us with a rich teaching career in art and training teachers in service. Since the mid-1960s, Steve has been working with a curricular design that resulted in the international “Storyline” network. He is a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Singapore and the VSU (Danish Pedagogical University). He is chairman of the European association for Educational Design (EED) which is made up of the leading practitioners of Storyline from 14 different countries.
Clyde Coreil (coreil@erols.com)
Plenary Session: Harnessing the Imagination to a Neglected Ear
The enormous accomplishments made via the scientific method have caused many persons to suspect that there is a fundamental opposition between that method and the imagination. Dr. Coreil holds that the two are inextricably intertwined. He will explore the relationship in language acquisition between the memory, the visual wiring to the language processing part of the brain, and the auditory wiring. It is the memory and the auditory that seem to do most of the work in first language acquisition, yet there is much emphasis on the visual in the form of images and reading in books, overt instruction and particularly the internet. Dr. Coreil will consider that memory and the auditory are powerful tools that have been somewhat neglected in language study, and he will report on the role of the imagination in the formation of that hypothesis.
Dr. Clyde Coreil is Professor of English as a Second Language at New Jersey City University, Chair of his Program, and editor of The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the City University of New York and an M.F.A. in playwriting and theatre from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Most recently, he has edited an anthology of 30 presentations on innovation in higher education entitled Multiple Intelligences, Howard Gardner and New Methods of College Teaching which contains an original piece by Dr. Gardner and which is now in press. Dr. Coreil has written 25 plays including one that received a National Endowment for the Arts award and two long plays with music that he composed. The latest is entitled Homelands about a sparrow who sings magnificently but cannot fly. His life is saved by a caterpillar who doesn't understand transformation but thinks instead that she is dying. She disappears and he struggles to take her body, which is actually an empty cocoon, down the Mississippi River to her homeland in Louisiana.
Cedric Cullingford (c.i.cullingford@hud.ac.uk)
Plenary Session: Truth and Imagination: The Battle for Children's Minds
The concept of imagination has a long history but is, in many contemporary education systems, marginalized. Those in demanding jobs insist there is no time for it, given the need to deliver the curriculum, and those who make policy seem actually threatened by it. Imagination is, if we acknowledge its real meaning, central to the understanding of the human condition. This has all kinds of implications to the practice of teaching.
Dr. Cedric Cullingford is Professor of Education with the School of Education and Professional Development of the University of Huddersfield. His current research interests include the place of parents in the education system, attitude and stereotype formation, the development of understanding in the young, the causes of criminality, and the place of school in children's lives. The author of some books 20 books, he has taught at Wadham College (Oxford), the University of London, Charlotte Mason College (University of Lancaster), Oxford Brookes University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Brighton.
Kieran Egan (kieran_egan@sfu.ca)
Plenary Session: Engaging and Developing Children's Imaginations: How Important an Educational Aim
Everyone accepts that engaging and developing children's imaginations is an important educational aim. But it is an aim that seems usually to receive casual acceptance but little further attention.
Application has relied largely on individual teachers' intuition and ingenuity. There have, of course, been a few educators who have seen the imagination as central to education's tasks, notably our keynote speaker, Elliot Eisner. This paper will explore how we might more routinely engage students' imaginations in learning, and what might be some of the consequences of taking development of the imagination seriously as a central educational aim.
Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University, is the head of the Imaginative Education Research Group. He is the author of about a dozen books, including Teaching as Story Telling, Imagination in Teaching and Learning, The Educated Mind, and most recently, Getting it Wrong from the Beginning, He has co-authored, edited, or co-edited a number of other works, and authored over one hundred articles. In 1991 he received the Grawemeyer Award in Education. In 1993 he was elected as the first person in Education to the Royal Society of Canada. In 2000 he was elected as a Foreign Associate member of the (U.S.A.) National Academy of Education. In 2001 he was appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Education, and won a Killam Senior Research Scholarship. Several of his books have been translated into more than half a dozen European and Asian languages.
Maria do Céu Roldão (maria.roldao@netvisao.pt)
Plenary Session: How Useful is Imagination?
Debates on the role of imagination in education are frequently perceived as centred on a rich process of teaching and learning that will engage and foster students' imagination, associated with some kind of extra ability, vis-à-vis the "serious" competences that school is expected to enable students with. In her address Dr. Roldão will make a claim for the centrality of imagination as a key-competence, particularly for the present days and for the time to come, in a variety of domains that are on the agenda of the 21st century, and that will be tentatively explored. She will also discuss some of the problems presently emerging as a result of the neglect of this essential ability in present school curricula.
Maria do Ceu Roldão is a curriculum professor and researcher at the School of Education of Santarém and the Catholic University in Lisbon (Portugal). She worked for 18 years with elementary school children as a teacher, and teacher trainer, of History and Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from Simon Fraser University (Canada) in 1990.
