Imaginative Education at MultiLab

The transdisciplinary group of researchers at the EduSpace MultiLab is focusing upon the development of a new research project based on the philosophy and practice of Kieran Egan’s Imaginative Education. The aim of this project is to translate into local practice the inspiring principles developed and applied by Egan and his colleagues at the Centre for Imagination (at Simon Fraser University in Canada) and, to this end, perform the necessary research and development. Our ambition is to tailor the international educational experiments to the pedagogical environment of Italy in general, and of the trilingual territory South Tyrol in particular.

MultiLab wants to formulate an innovative curriculum that cultivates imagination for education in school, and for higher education of pre-service and in-service teachers at the Faculty of Education of the Free University of Bolzano. The extensive research—including numerous didactical experiments—in Primary Physical Science Education that has been performed and published by Federico Corni and Hans U. Fuchs (retired professor of physics, ZHAW, Winterthur, CH, currently a researcher at UNIBZ) and coworkers since 2010, represents a relevant specification of IE in the field of science education.

To achieve this challenging goal, the MultiLab partners are imagining a research project involving academics, schools and in-service teachers together. The idea was explored with educational stakeholders of the territory and as a result a workshop titled Imaginative Education was organized at MultiLab, with the invaluable collaboration of Simon Fraser University, on May 30, 2023.

For more infos about our CIRCE (Center for Imagination in Research, Culture, and Education): https://circe-sfu.ca/imaginative-education/