Imagination and Experience: An Integrative Framework.

Three variations of experience identified in the educational literature entail different ways of thinking about and developing learners’ imaginations. The relationship between these different imaginative modes resembles shifts between different kinds of understanding in Kieran Egan’s theory of imaginative development. From this theoretical collision, a new framework emerges that gives greater weight to the connections between experience and imagination, and that may help to guide new forms of democratic educational practice. Read responses to this article Online at democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol21/iss1/4/ Submit your own response to this article Submit online at democracyeducationjournal.org/home We live in an age and in a culture when young people may spend more time interacting with electronic devices than with one another, let alone with the morethanhuman world. Primary or firsthand experience risks becoming a dwindling resource in the face of the great flood of secondhand information that flows daily through the modern media. Learning to deal critically and intelligently with the latter is selfevidently an important facet of democratic education. But what of the former? What, exactly, is the educational value of experience? And are particular varieties of experience more essential than others for the building of a living democracy? How might we think strategically and creatively about the embedding of experience in the process of schooling? These are the kinds of questions I hope to shed light on in this essay. My initial engagement with these issues arose from my work with Canadian indigenous organizations on the problem of language maintenance and revitalization (e.g., Fettes, 1992; Fettes & Norton, 2000). Around the world, local languages are being lost at an everincreasing rate, with farreaching consequences for human cultural diversity and development (Nettle & Romaine, 2000) and, more broadly, for ecocultural health (Rapport & Maffi, 2011). At the heart of what is being lost are locally sensitive ways of understanding human embeddedness in the morethanhuman world (Abram, 1997). Responses to language loss that focus on language alone miss this key point: Indigenous languages derive much of their meaning from their responsiveness to ecologically and historically particular shared experiences of place and being. The relationship between experience and language thus becomes an extremely important question for educators who see cultural diversity as a value and a resource, whether on grounds of equity, inclusion, critique, or sustainability. Yet teasing out that relationship is a complex task. Language is a problematic enough term in and of itself (Fettes, 1997, 2003); experience is at least equally fraught with ambiguity, as experiential educator Fox (2008) observed in a thoughtful meditation: What exactly is experience? Whose experience is heard? Think for a moment: When does an experience begin— at the start of an activity? Does it include the planning and framing by leaders? What about the histories and political realities of the participants? What historical period will we choose? Once the “experience” begins, how does an individual, observer, researcher, participant, or leader identify “the” experience? How is an experience demarcated from the flow of Mark Fettes is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada. His work concerns the role of imagination in language learning and cultural reproduction and in teaching and learning in general. He has led two major communitybased research projects exploring how imaginative teaching might contribute to developing schools that are responsive to the places and communities around them.