Imagination, cognitive tools and reluctant students

  • Kieran Egan
  • Gillian C. Judson

Keywords:

imagination, curricular contents, cognitive tools

Abstract

This paper analyzes how children and teenagers whom we call “reluctant students” are often, anything but reluctant to learn some things. They show all kinds of signs of imaginative participation- but their participation seems unable to connect with the school syllabus. We could wonder: How could we manage to have a curriculum so imaginative and attractive as the world that is exposed to the students? A new answer for some or a lot of those students could come from Lev Vygotsky’s research (1962, 1997). His notion of “cognitive tools” gives us a way to explore how we could capture and involve those students’ imagination to make them see that, what is really wonderful and engaging in the syllabus, could be learnt by anyone and could be turned into a cognitive tool. In this paper we shall see how the cognitive tools to make up stories, the binary opposites and the images generated through words, could be used in a new way. Each of them was at one point, a considerable important cultural invention, and each of them turns now, into a potential cognitive tool to increase our ability to think, communicate and understand.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Kieran Egan

Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C. Canadá V5A 1S6

Gillian C. Judson

Faculty of Education

Simon Fraser University

Burnaby, B.C. Canada V5A 1S6

Downloads

Published

2012-12-27

How to Cite

Egan, K., & Judson, G. C. (2012). Imagination, cognitive tools and reluctant students. Praxis Educativa, 16(2), 8–18. Retrieved from https://ojs.unlpam.edu.ar/index.php/praxis/article/view/528

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2012): agosto-diciembre

Section

Artículos

License

Copyright Notice

Editorial Committee Educational Praxis Magazine:
I hereby declare that I am the author of the article titled (article name), that it is original and my own and that it was not previously published in any other format or medium. I declare to know that the magazine will not charge me any type of fee under any circumstances, nor will I receive any type of monetary compensation If it were accepted for publication in Educational Praxis, I authorize the aforementioned magazine to publish it digitally and to advertise it on its social networks.
If the work is published, I adhere to the Creative Commons license called "Attribution - Non-Commercial Share Alike CC BY-NC-SA", through which it is allowed to copy, reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate the work and generate derivative works, as long as when the original author is cited and acknowledged. This license has been used since September 2018. In 2016 CC BY NC ND 4.0 was adhered to; and in the years 2017 and 2018 (January-August) CC BY NC 4.0.
This CC BY-NC-SA Share Alike license does not, however, permit commercial use of the work. As an author, the journal may establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal, it allows me to self-archive the published articles, in their post-print version, in institutional, thematic repositories, personal web pages or any other relevant use. with the recognition of having been first published in this journal.
Educational Praxis adheres to DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)  signed in San Francisco, California, on December 16, 2012, and to the Declaration of Mexico (Joint Declaration LATINDEX - REDALYC - CLACSO - IBICT).