Search Results

Chapter 4 explores the role of the narrative imagination in education, both in the classroom and beyond. Drawing on more than 25 years in the classroom, the chapter examines the stifling effect of current models of education on the ability of students and teachers to make connections between their formal learning and their lives, as they are and as they might be. The chapter poses fundamental pedagogical questions: What do we want our students/our children to learn and why? What can ignite curiosity, a desire to question, and to investigate? What is the relationship between learning about the world as it is, and imagining ways of improving it? The chapter concludes with a discussion of the vital role of education in teaching individuals about the meaning of democratic citizenship.

Oedipus Tyrannus is an exacting study in philosophical psychology, portraying a mind that oscillates between competing conceptions of the sources of knowledge, between layered self-deception and moments of self-knowledge, and between competing self-narratives or self-descriptions. This essay explores the philosophical significance of this play by examining these inner tensions as they manifest in thought, word, and deed. This significance is described in terms of a self gradually becoming able to imagine itself and to describe itself in ways initially believed to be the imagining and describing of an unknown other, where a kind of “spectral presence” by steps becomes ever closer to the mind of Oedipus. This culminates at the final point where that imagined presence comes to correspond identically and tragically with the uncovered self that is the true Oedipus.

The concluding chapter argues that the consideration of the role of imagination in everyday life is intricately bound to questions of our relationship to the world, to history, and to our ability to reflect on our lives and to choose our actions. The narrative imagination is an integral part of human agency, as with it rests our ability to locate a role for ourselves in the task of creating new realities. The themes of temporality, the construction of ‘the other’, and the seeing of new possibilities are discussed as they relate to the preceding chapters. The ability to imagine, which is a key force behind our ability to create meaning and multiple meanings, is integrally bound to how we live our lives and our ability to discern other possible ways of being.