Our thinking about imagination has been strongly influenced by Kieran Egan, a
professor of education at Simon Fraser University. In a series of books stretching over
more than two decades (e.g. Egan 1979; 1983; 1992; 1997), Egan has argued for a very
different picture of intellectual development than the Piagetian orthodoxy. Most thinking,
he argues, involves the appropriation of cultural tools such as language, rather than trying
to puzzle out the world in isolation, as Piaget imagined. Different cultural tools – for
instance, those associated with the oral language of a community, with popular literacy,
or with disciplinary thinking – engender somewhat distinct ways of understanding the
world, which are not always easily reconciled. Yet the greater the range of tools we have
at our disposal, the more flexible and powerful our thinking is likely to be; therefore the
proper goal of education is to attempt a reconciliation, to cultivate the best of each kind
of understanding and avoid reliance on any single way of relating to the world.
Often associated with the phrase “teaching as storytelling,” Egan’s vision of
effective classroom practice is in fact quite complex and difficult to convey in a
condensed fashion. For not just any story will do; nor does the story do the teaching on its