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Resources
- Discussion Papers
Imagining
the Self:
The Individual Imagination in the English Classroom
Notes
on Ray Misson’s keynote address to the Joint National Conference
of AATE, ALEA and AFMLTA, Adelaide 1999 compiled by Karen Clark and Bronwen
Bowman. The address is available on tape and may be published in a slightly
different form in the near future.
If
a speech can combine poetry, voice, music and soul — this one is
it!
In the recent
movement towards outcomes based learning, many policy makers and curriculum
developers feel uncomfortable about the imagination because it is hard
to define in terms of outcomes. The imagination is often seen as being
opposed to reason and therefore not easily quantified. In the eighteenth
century, the imagination was treated with great suspicion; and the romantic
revolution was very much affected by the liberating and valuing of imagination
— note the works of Keats and Coleridge.
Imagination
is a function of the human mind and there is nothing mystical about it.
It has no ethical charge in that it can create both good and bad. Imagination
is not single and monolithic. If there is such a thing as multiple intelligences,
then there are also multiple imaginations — for example, musical
imagination. Imagination is neither abstract intellect nor in the realm
of emotions — it bridges both.
We use imagination
for the purposes of escape, creativity and for developing sympathy. Imagination
may be seen as transformative. Fragments are combined together to produce
a new whole. Imagination is also a synthesiser. It brings together experiences
in significant ways. However, imagination will always be socially and
culturally conditioned. The products of the imagination have an irreducibly
individual element. Imagination is individual, personal and felt strongly.
The desire
for things to be different drives the imagination and can arise from fear
- of instability, for example. Texts engage our imaginative capacities
as we develop a new reading self. Imagination is crucial to a reader’s
role as text participant.Texts involve
us by making us work at creating meaning in them. In the text participant
role, we create our own version of a new kind of text.
"And
no doubt that is what reading is. Re-writing the text of the
work into the text of our lives." (R. Barthes)
This is why
reading matters. When we work with a text and make it part of our own
experience, we write it into our own lives.
One of the
things we read for is sympathetic understanding. Reading extends our metaphors
of how we might live. It opens up personal possibilities finding new imaginative
possibilities in the self that might be outwardly inhabited.
The place
of imagination is more obvious when we look at writing. Writing is a process
of transformation, changing the material present in the mind into a new
shape. Writing produces the self. To write projects our image of the self
and we can inhabit the image even as we produce. We create different writing
selves.
We must get
students to imagine themselves into the different discourses in which
we want them to create. We cannot assume the imagination is necessarily
good. Imagination is not the same in everybody — we need to listen
to what imaginatively excites students in their world, but not uncritically.
Imagination is not morally neutral — we can as easily go wrong as
right. Misson referred to the American tragedy at Columbine High School.
The gang called itself the "trench-coat mafia". They saw themselves
as outcasts, angry at "the jocks". They read and wrote themselves
into being — on "the net" and in poetry in the classroom.
They made no attempt to hide the workings of their minds. This was a case
of the failure of the imagination on two counts:
- a failure
of sympathetic imagination in that the students were unable to comprehend
what their actions might mean for their victims;
- a failure
of the students to imagine themselves inserted into their world in different,
more productive ways.
Note: Misson
is not suggesting that a good English teacher might have been able to
avert this tragedy, but that we have the potential to open new possibilities
and ways of thinking.
What do we
do as teachers if we get writing that disturbs? We cannot accept the work
uncritically. We need to help students develop other kinds of imagination
that lead to different actions. Change will not come about without imagination.
We need to imagine ways that things can be better. New ways of thinking
can only come through transformation of what we have. The imagination
is the ground of both social and personal possibilities. We need time
to think seriously about how we can work to develop strong, ethical, critical
imaginations.
Misson referred
to and played a part of the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. Although
he recognised it as a piece of 70’s "romanticism" he finished
by saying, "You may call me a dreamer…"
Listen to
the clapping on the tape. He’s not the only one.
Karen Clark,
Kingston High
Bronwen Bowman,
Hobart College
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