Equally importantly, we believe our students need to experience the program
itself as imaginative pedagogy, and to reflect explicitly on the philosophy behind it. In
our first module, we suspect that our field trips, our imaginative exercises and
discussions, were too independent of each other, rather than embedded in a coherent
imaginative framework to which the students’ attention was constantly redirected. One
alternative, highlighted in Egan’s work, would be to structure the term, or indeed the
entire one-year program, as a kind of narrative. Teaching is an activity imbued with the
affective contrasts that Egan sees as the foundations of all great narrative: connection and
isolation, constraint and transcendence, security and risk, indifference and love. Yet so
often we avoid these perilous waters, allowing our students to finish the year with little
more than a sense of having “gotten through it,” in much the same sense that they earlier
“got through” high school. If they are to provide more than this for their own students,
they need to acquire a mythic and romantic sense of themselves as teachers, imperfect
heroes of the great story of education – a sense that will not be acquired if the program is
not deliberately structured along narrative lines. This, we think, is perhaps the greatest
gift this year of induction can give them.