Dr. Kieran Egan

Dr. Kieran Egan is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, and the founder and director of the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG). He is the author of about a dozen books, and co-author, editor, or co-editor of a few more. He is author of 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. Various of his books have been translated into more than half a dozen European and Asian languages.

Abstract:
"What are cognitive tools and how many of them are there?"

This talk will focus on how we can adequately imagine the process of education. We all know that education involves some form of "development"--that children learn mastery of all kinds of intellectual tools, like language and mathematics, and that their higher psychological processes become more "mature" or sophisticated--but, it will be suggested,   the traditional ways in which people have tried to capture and describe this development in our education are not entirely satisfactory. In an attempt to give a more central role to the imagination in this process, members of the Imaginative Education Research Group have been focusing on a version of Vygotsky's sense of accumulating "cognitive tools" as the basis for a more adequate account of education and as providing a more adequate ground for prescriptions about teaching and the curriculum. An attempt will be made to clarify how we might build a conception of educational development with the building blocks of "cognitive tools."

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