IMAGINATION

IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TEACHER EDUCATION

Submitted by
Chris Lima

to University College Plymouth St Mark & St John as a dissertation for the degree of
Master of Education by advanced study in Education (special field: Trainer
Development – English Language Teaching), September 2009.

I certify that all the material in this dissertation which is not my own work has been
identified and that no material is included for which a degree has previously been
conferred upon me.

Plymouth, September 2009

 ABSTRACT

This study is an investigation of the place of imagination in EFL teacher education. It

begins with a brief analysis of the presence and absence of overt references to
imagination in mainstream EFL professional literature, in ELT international conferences
and in the syllabuses of some Initial Teacher Education programmes. It moves on into a
discussion of the Western philosophical understandings of imagination along history
and how these systems of thoughts, and the status they give to it, influence approaches
to imagination in teacher education. This study also considers the imagination in its
connections with notions of knowledge and reflective practices in professional
development. Most importantly, it proposes to give imagination a central role in the
process of achieving change in teacher education. It concludes with an examination of
how the use of metaphors and narratives can positively contribute to the change process
and help EFL teachers to develop professionally.

In times when terms like ‘lifelong education’, ‘change theory’, ‘reflective practice’ and
‘information society’ seem to have become widespread concepts, it is the aim of this
study to propose an approach to English language teacher education that reviews
technicist and managerial practices. This study proposes to bring the discussion of our
understanding of human imagination to the training room and considers possible ways
of helping teachers to see the implications of adopting different attitudes towards
imagination. It is based on the belief that imagination has a fundamental role to play in
the construction of our understanding of ELT teacher education and in the establishment
of the principles of our professional practice.

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 ...imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name

A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.14-17

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 For Eduardo, my son

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 Table of Contents

Page
Abstract 2
Dedication 4
Table of Contents 5
List of Figures 7
List of Abbreviations 8
Introduction 9

CHAPTER ONE. Background and Contexts

Introduction 12
1. Publications 13
1.1 Resource books 14
1.2 Books for teachers 15
1.3 Journals and academic publications 18
2. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) 20
3. TESOL Initial Teacher Education (ITE) 21
3.1 Diploma courses 21
3.2 Undergraduate courses 22
Summary 24

CHAPTER TWO. Understandings of Imagination

Introduction 25
1. A general view of imagination 25
1.1 Imagination and creativity 26
1.2 Imagination, subjectivity and reality 27
2. A story of imagination in the West 31
2.1 Pre-modern imagination: from Ancient to Medieval times 31
2.2 Modern imagination: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 35
2.3 Romantic imagination: from Georgian to Victorian times 38
2.4 Postmodern imagination: from the 20th century to present times 40
3. Theory and Practice 41
3.1 Pre-modern imagination and the didactic model 42

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 3.2 Modern imagination and the scientific approaches 44
3.3 Romantic imagination and humanistic approaches 46
3.4 Postmodern imagination and new trends in teacher education 46
Summary 47

CHAPTER THREE. Teachers’ Imagination

Introduction 48
1. Imagination and knowledge 51
2. Imagination and reflection 54
3. Imagination and change 57
Summary 61

CHAPTER FOUR. Exercising Imagination

Introduction 62
1. Some principles 63
2. Metaphors 64
3. Narratives 67
3.1 Teachers’ narratives 68
3.2 Literature 70
Summary 73

Postscript 74

List of Appendices
Appendix A: Major schools of though and their influences on teacher education 76
Appendix B: Literary references 78
Appendix C: A metaphor for the EFL classroom 81
Appendix D: This is my story: teachers’ biographies 83
Appendix E: Film narratives: Mona Lisa Smile 85
Appendix F: Novel narratives: Hard Times 87

Bibliography 89

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 List of Figures
Page

Figure 1: Academic Publications. Search: Imagination. 19

Figure 2: Imaginative and creative content in presentations at IATEFL Annual 20
Conferences.
Figure 3: Examples of manifestations of teacher trainers’ imagination along the 30
object-subject axes.
Fig. 4: The human thinking tree 49
Fig. 5: The teacher education tree. 50
Fig. 6. Using literature in teacher education - some working principles. 72

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 List of Abbreviations

AD Anno Domini (Christian Era)

BA Bachelor of Arts
BANA Britain, Australasia and North America countries
BEd Bachelor of Education
BC Before Christ
CELTA Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults
CertTESOL The Trinity Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages
CPD Continuing Professional Development
CUP Cambridge University Press
EFL English as a Foreign Language
ELT English Language Teaching
ELT Journal English Language Teaching Journal
ESL English as a Second Language
IATEFL International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign
Language
ITE Initial Teacher Education
Marjon University College Plymouth St Mark & St John
MEd Master of Education
OUP Oxford University Press
PUCRS Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
TAs Teachers’ Associations
TESOL Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages
UFSM Universidade Federal de Santa Maria

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INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time,

Every piece of writing has a story; even when this story is not explicitly told and the
beginning, middle and end are not so easily identifiable. My first act in writing this
study began before writing itself and was an attempt to identify the origins of my choice
of a topic. I could distinguish three sources which I broadly equate with my cultural
background and professional dissatisfaction. To elucidate these points I believe I have
to tell some of these stories.

In 1964 the Military seized the power in Brazil. I grew up in a country where freedom
of speech was seen as tantamount to insurrection, where books were suspicious things
that no law-abiding citizen should deal with - unless they were granted official approval.
The State provided the prescribed books we used at school; the Catholic Church
provided the interpretation of the Bible at Sunday mass. It would be a happy life were it
not for the fact that the public library was quite near my school and one day I found out
that there were other books besides those ones I had at school. They were not censored
because they were ‘Classics’ and, therefore, had a good and traditionally established
reputation. Not even the Military would dare to censor Dante, Shakespeare, Austen or
even Dickens; not because they respected them, but probably because they were not
smart enough to perceive the threat in them. It was just literature, after all. When I was
about 11, I used to spend my afternoons reading in the library because, obviously, you
could not take books home. Too dangerous. Of course, I did not know these things at
the time and my comments now are tinted by hindsight. In my childhood and teenage
years, I was completely oblivious to the political climate around me. I was neither a
revolutionary nor a ‘Communist’, which was considered a public insult. I just wanted to
read stories because they appealed to my imagination. But, indeed, what a dangerous
thing a library is. Once you are in there one book takes you to another, stories take you
to poems, poems take you to other stories and everything falls into a network of
connections that may set your imagination on fire.

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When I started my career in English Language Teaching (ELT) in the early 1990s, the
years of Military rule and censorship were well behind us; we were now enjoying the
‘delights’ of democracy, cultural consumerism and globalisation. I thought I would find
a professional environment that would take me back to ‘the library’ but this time with a
licence to read and think. I thought I would find an environment where teachers read
and discussed things, made connections between what they read and what they
practiced. After all, all my colleagues at the schools where I worked had a formal
teacher training background and had studied literature, psychology, pedagogy and
methodology at university. I supposed that I would be entering a world where people
would creatively put all these things together. What I found was an environment where
the coordinators provided the prescribed books we used in the classroom and the teacher
trainers provided the ‘acceptable’ ELT methodology in the Friday afternoon meetings.
Imagination in teaching was either not mentioned, or relegated to the use of games in
language learning. Things had not changed much in 30 years after all.

My interest in the place and role of imagination in teacher education comes partially
from my personal history and greatly from my dissatisfaction with the
compartmentalised, piece-meal approach to teacher education followed in most
contexts, where ‘modules’ in teacher training programmes are disconnected from each
other and dissociated from the larger body of other subjects in the ‘humanities’, such as
literature and the arts. My perception is that there is still a most unnatural rift between
imagination, knowledge and practice that starts in teacher education programmes and
extends throughout the professional literature in ELT into classroom practice. My
interest in imagination also springs from a somehow aesthetic need to be involved by
what I perceive as the beauty of images and words. I cannot dissociate my personal life
and my professional practice from manifestations of creative imagination and even
though I do not have the pretention to say that the present study is in any way
particularly creative, imaginative and aesthetically pleasing as a piece of writing, I felt
the need to write about something that referred to these aspects of experience in my
field of knowledge, thus the choice of imagination in English language teacher
education as the topic of this study.

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In Chapter One of my study I shall look at some EFL materials published by major
international publishers, ELT international conference programmes and the syllabuses
of some Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes to detect the presence or absence
of overt discussions of imagination in ELT teacher education.

In Chapter Two I will take a brief look at some understandings of imagination from a
historical and philosophical point of view and how these different understandings of the
nature of imagination, truth and self have influenced Western conceptions of
knowledge, identity and our place in the world. Moreover, I shall take a closer look at
the connections between theories of imagination and the current principles underlining
teacher education in order to establish some connections between these concepts and
some educational views and practices.

Chapter Three will examine how philosophical and historical understanding of

imagination influence the way we conceive the sort of knowledge EFL teachers should
have, how it interacts with reflective practices and also analyse the role imagination has
to play in educational change processes.

Chapter Four will deal with some practical aspects related to the implementation of a
more imaginative approach to teacher education and how imaginative and creative
material can be brought into the language learning and teacher education equation.
From Greek myths to fairy tales, from Star Wars and computerised worlds, human
imagination has invented and reinvented itself and its manifestations can be explored in
the use of metaphors and narratives.

The Appendices aim at providing further information about the mentioned historical
periods and philosophical systems (A), as well as on the literary works quoted or
referred to in this study (B). They also provide some sample activities using metaphors
(C), teachers’ biographies (D) and fictional narratives (E-F), which can be used in
teacher education courses and/or workshops.

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CHAPTER ONE

Background and Contexts

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived
the magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into
yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (1964)

INTRODUCTION

Room 170 was quite a world apart. If you had the opportunity to enter it during the time
when we were having our Masters in Education (MEd) in Trainer Development sessions
you would probably be surprised to see that the walls were covered in posters with
photos and drawings of golf courses, mountains, rainbows, dolphins and cauldrons.
What is really interesting about it is that the posters were the products of our discussions
during the sessions. They were individual, group and/or collective productions that
represented our metaphors, concepts and understandings of English language teaching
and learning, and which we proudly displayed on the walls. Incomplete as it is, this
description of our training room may help you to see the extent to which our MEd
programme was based on imagination, creativity and the participants’ personal
contributions to the training process. My own previous experience with formal English
as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education programmes and academic work,
however, equated learning only with heavy reading and vigorous scholarly debate. That
there would also be a place for metaphors and drawings in my MEd course came as
sheer novelty to me.

In order to try to understand where these perceptions and expectations came from, I
shall begin this analysis of the presence or absence of discussions of imagination in EFL
teacher education by looking at three major areas: (a) professional publications, (b)
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) events, and (c) Initial Teacher Education
(ITE) programmes.

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1. PUBLICATIONS

My previous experience with professional literature is very likely one of the sources of
my surprise in seeing imaginative activities integrated into my MEd course. Most titles
on my own professional bookshelf cover matters such as methodology, phonology,
semantics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, skills development, classroom management
and a couple of resource books with ready-to-use activities and photocopiable material.
I do not recall any specific title on imagination and creativity as part of my pre-MEd
English Language Teaching book collection, even though some works on literature in
language learning (Brumfit, 1986; Collie and Slater, 1987; Lazar, 2003, McRae, 1991;
Brumfit, 2001) and discourse analysis (Cook, 1994) do bring notions of imagination
embedded in their content.

ELT publishing is a profitable and thriving industry with hundreds of titles already
published and with new book launches on regular basis. The market is largely
dominated by major international publishers, which in the UK are often associated with
traditional ancient universities and in the US are divisions of major publishing
companies. Teachers all over the world have access to ELT publications, from
textbooks to resource books and books for teachers, and use such material as course
syllabuses, sources of practical ideas and professional development reading. Thanks to
vigorous marketing, a widespread network of representatives and a system of
sponsorships for Teachers Associations (TAs) events and conferences, major publishing
houses make their products available to a large number of teachers and schools all over
the world and dominate the ELT publishing market. Such dominance and the market
forces that determine the sort of material published are seen by some ELT educators as
factors that lead, particularly in the case of coursebooks, to the dissemination of
predetermined cultural and educational values (Canagarajah, 1999: 104), a certain
determinism of goals and content (Allwright, 1990: 133-5) and a process of
reproduction of content where originality is frequently lost (Thornbury and Meddings,
2001: 12). Although coursebooks are not the focus of this study, it does not seem
implausible to extend the same critical view to other kinds of ELT publications.
Nonetheless, because of their significant influence with both language teachers and
teacher trainers, and their well-established international reputation, the examination of
the catalogue of major ELT publishers can give us an idea of the current status and state

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of imagination and creativity in ELT circles. I have restricted my ‘field’ research to the
titles available at the language library at the University College Plymouth St Mark and
St John (Marjon) and to the online catalogue of major European publishers because
these are the main sources of EFL literature I refer to for my own professional
development and the sources of materials I use in my own teaching practice. My
findings are by no means exhaustive but they may shed some light on our discussion of
imagination in teacher education.

We could divide EFL professional publications into three broad categories: (a) resource
books, i.e., supplementary materials which supply teachers with ready-to-use activities
for their lessons, (b) books for teachers, i.e., titles on linguistics, research, methodology
and trends in language teaching and learning, and (c) journals and academic
publications.

1.1 Resource books

Although books with ready-to-use activities, or resource books, are considered as

‘supplementary’ material - and therefore devoid of the status of ‘essential’ publications
enjoyed by mainstream coursebooks - they are by and large very popular among
publishers and EFL practitioners. There is plenty of material available for teachers who
want to use activities that explore the imaginative, creative side of their English
language learners. A general search on Resource Books yields a result of nineteen titles
at Marjon’s language library catalogue, including books with activities using songs,
stories, roleplay, poetry and project work, most of them destined to teachers working
with children and young learners. Eight out of twenty-eight titles in the very popular
Oxford University Press (OUP) series of Resource Books for Teachers
(http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/isbn/31013/?cc=gb) are devoted to poetry, drama
and improvisation, film, images, music, roleplay and story telling. Ten out of the forty-
two titles in the Cambridge University Press (CUP) series Cambridge Handbooks for
Language Teachers (http://www.cambridge.org/elt/catalogue/catalogue.asp?cid=15)
cover topics such as drama, extensive reading, literature, poetry, folktales, humour,
games and images. The CUP photocopiable series also brings titles on grammar and
vocabulary games, multimedia, imaginative projects and metaphors. Helbling

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Publishers have one title on each of the following: writing stories, creative writing and
the use of images (http://www.helblinglanguages.com/index.php?option=com_
content&task=blogcategory&id=35&Itemid=133).

Some titles can serve as examples of how imagination and creativity seem to be
considered important elements in language learning. Bassnett and Grundy’s (1993)
Language Through Literature, brings a series of activities based on the awareness of
differences in language and literary genres. Exercises experiment with a wide variety of
reading approaches to text, for instance, predicting, grouping, assessing, translating,
visualising, associating text and personal experience. Writing activities include shape
poems, collaborative writing, text creative rewriting and performance of texts created by
learners themselves. Duff and Maley’s (1989) The Inward Ear, is a series of activities to
use poetry in the language classroom. It advocates for the universality, non-triviality,
motivation and tolerance to error and ambiguity developed by poetry readers. Activities
are based on personal associations, use of pictures, creative writing and speaking. More
recently, Arnold, Putcha and Rinvolucri’s (2007) Imagine That! stresses the importance
of mental imagery in the cognitive process of language learning and provides activities
to work with both artwork and music.

1.2 Books for Teachers

In very striking contrast with the number of titles on storytelling, drama and multi-
media published as supplementary materials, the search for imaginative content in the
Books for Teachers category yielded very poor and disappointing results. Considering
the number of ‘creative’ supplementary materials titles compared to the ones dealing
with aspects of imagination in language learning and teacher education, we may be led
to believe that publishers and teachers give priority to teaching recipes over the quest
for information and inspiration when reading professional literature. Palgrave
Macmillan online catalogue of books for teachers has one title on literature in ELT,
Hall’s (2005) Literature in Language Education. CUP has one title on extensive reading
in The Cambridge Language Education Series, Day and Bramford’s (1998) Extensive
Reading in the Second Language Classroom. OUP has one title in the Applied
Linguistic series, Cook’s (2000) Language Play, Language Learning. I did not find

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titles dealing with imagination associated with discussions of language and knowledge
in the applied linguistics catalogue of either of the two major Universities Presses.
It seems to be a trend in ELT publishing that the exploration of imagination, creativity
and the arts in language learning must be pursued and that teachers should be provided
with a good supply of add-on material to use music, drawings, poetry, drama and role
play in the language classroom. However, the same does not happen when it comes to
professional reading. Articles and books dealing with the principles and implications of
understanding and exercising imagination are few and scattered. The whole message
seems to be that imagination is an important component of learning a language but does
not have any substantial contribution to make to the formation of teachers as
professionals. Some of the best-sellers in ELT teacher training literature, especially
titles published in the 1990s, have a strongly analytic, objectivist, technical rationalist
approach to teacher education. These texts reflect the historical supremacy of
communicative language teaching at the time and the dominance of the knowledge and
skill development model, where the aim is to create ‘a teaching force that is more
skilled and flexible in its teaching strategies and more knowledgeable about its subject
matter’ (Hargraves and Fullan, 1992: 2). Doff’s (1998) Teach English, a ‘classic’ in the
teacher training literature, is basically concerned with teaching and class management
skills and even though imagination is potentially emergent in some activities proposed,
such as the improvisation of dialogues and interviews based on texts, Doff’s focal point
is definitely the development of practical teaching skills. Ur’s (1996) A Course in
Language Teaching, another ‘classic’, provides ready-made training sessions on all
main aspects of ELT practice. Activities cover presentation techniques, testing, the
teaching of grammar and vocabulary, pronunciation, four skills, planning and classroom
interaction, but once again the approach is exclusively objectivist and activities are
based on brainstorming, evaluation of materials, and analysis of sample language and
classroom situations. The use of computers, story books, video, audio, posters, pictures
and games is considered ‘invaluable’ but only ‘for young learners and teachers of
children’ (Ur, 1996: 190-1). Another ‘canonical’ text is Harmer’s (1998) How To Teach
English, which is still adopted as a key text by many undergraduate courses, such as the
TESOL/English Language Teaching BA at the University of Greenwich. It focuses on
fundamentals in language acquisition, teaching language skills, and considerations in
language management, but once again activities are largely based on objective

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‘scientific’ analysis and there are no instances when teachers are invited to discuss the
role of imagination in language teaching.

Conversely, some titles such as Woodward’s (2001) Planning Lessons and Courses, do
take into account personalisation, exploration of trainee teachers’ feelings, styles and
preferences. Although most activities are still based on factual information, situation
analysis, mini-case studies and sample of teaching materials, there are some activities
with a definite potential for imaginative work such as the ones based on teachers’
biographies, and responses to literature, where participants are encouraged to create a
work of their own. In Malderez and Bodoczky’s (1999) Mentor Courses: A Resource
Book for Trainer-Trainers, metaphors are frequently used in activities proposed to
participants, who are invited to create and explore their own images of teaching and
learning. Malderez and Wedell’s (2007) Teaching Teachers, gives a privileged place to
stories, personal narratives and game play in the process of educating teachers. James’
(2001) Teachers in Action, is a collection of materials and tasks for in-service training
with activities focusing on personal experience, analysis of professional discussion of
key concepts and terminology and summary of professional articles. Tasks are based on
conceptual maps, questionnaires and interviews, opinion sharing and matching
exercises. There is one task involving the use of metaphor; however, the metaphor is
given to participants instead of being elicited from them. Scrivener’s (2005: 360)
Learning Teaching, almost falls into the category of resource books for teachers, but
proposes a more principled discussion of the use of drama, simulations, guided
improvisation and poetry as a way to stimulate teachers to see, hear and think of
linguistic points beyond ‘predictable textbook examples.’ Wright and Bolitho’s (2007)
Trainer Development clearly points to a significant change towards a more personalised
approach to teacher education, where metaphors, games and drawings are used to help
participants to make sense of their experience and unpack their beliefs and perceptions
about teaching and learning. Important and relevant as they are, these books, however,
still represent a very tiny fraction in the EFL catalogues of books for teachers which are
dominated by titles on applied linguistics, research and different aspects of classroom
management.

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1.3 Journals and academic publications

No account of ELT professional reading would be significant without considering

articles from the ELT Journal (http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/). A search for
‘imagination’ in the entire ELT Journal Online Archive since 1946 produced a result of
308 items. The search for ‘creativity’ resulted in 165 items, including articles,
comments and reviews. However, these articles do not deal specifically with
imagination in teacher training but are mostly concerned with creative ways of teaching
literature in ELT. A few examples are Elliot’s (1990) ‘Encouraging reader-response to
literature in ESL situations’; Ghosn’s (2002) ‘Four good reasons to use literature in
primary school ELT’ and Ross’ (1991) ‘Literature and Film’.

A survey of the articles published at the TESOL Quarterly between 1986 and 2005 on
topics related to imagination and creativity resulted in three articles on the use of
literature in second language learning, one article on the use of roleplay (Heath, 1993),
one article on the use of comic strips (Liu, 2004) and one on metaphorical competence
in language learning (Littlemore, 2001). I did not find any articles with overt reference
to imagination and/or creativity in neither in language learning nor in teacher education.

On creative uses of language in everyday communication and its implications to

language teaching and learning we have Carter and McCarthy’s (2004) ‘Talking,
creating: interactional language, creativity and context’ published in the Oxford Applied
Linguistics Journal and also Prodromou’s (2007) ‘Bumping into creative idiomacity’
published in English Today.

Apart from mainstream ELT publications it is important to highlight the existence of

The Journal of Imagination in Language Teaching and Learning which was published
from 1993 to 2003 and which ‘is concerned with theoretical and practical relationships
between the imagination and the acquisition of first and subsequent languages.’ The
contents of the six volumes are now available online (http://www.njcu.edu/cill/journal-
index.html). Among the 117 articles published there, it is worth mentioning
Moskovitz’s (1994: online) ‘Humanistic Imagination: Soul Food for the Language
Class,’ where she argues for the importance of ‘setting examples of creativity’ among
teachers themselves and the debate Is TESOL an art or a Science?, moderated by Nunan

18
with arguments and comments in a series of articles by Shohamy, Widdowson, Larsen-
Freemanm, and Tucker (http://www.njcu.edu/cill/journal-index.html).

As for academic publications, crossing the words ‘imagination’, ‘creativity’ and

‘education’ at Marjon’s library online catalogue, we can obtain a total of 26 titles, most
of them devoted to primary education. Search for ‘imagination’ alone produced a total
of 163 titles. Even more impressive numbers were found in the online catalogues of
major academic publishers (Fig. 1); however, such works are not connected with
language teacher education or language learning; instead they focus on other knowledge
fields such as general education, cognitive sciences, visual arts, literature, history and
philosophy. Imagination remains by and large out of the language teacher education
realm.

Publisher No of titles found in the publishers’

entire online catalogues
Oxford University Press 333
Cambridge University Press 82
Routledge 60
Palgrave-Macmillan 35
Open University Press 11

Figure 1: Academic Publications. Search: Imagination.

The way the content and ideas advanced in books and articles are disseminated among
ELT practitioners is mainly through teacher education programmes, courses,
workshops, seminars and conferences which are sponsored and supported by major
publishers. Therefore, teacher education events and programmes will be the focus of the
next section.

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2. CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (CPD)

Disputable as it may be in terms of long term results, sustainability and impact (Lamb,
1995: 78-9) and cultural appropriateness (Leather, 2001:232), attendance at short
courses, talks and workshops in conferences is still an important and stimulating part of
ELT professional life for most teachers and teacher trainers (Beaven, 2009: 8).
Conferences organised by TAs usually attract a fairly good number of delegates and a
flow of ELT professionals linked to the publishing industry, education providers, e.g.
colleges and universities, and institutions interested in the promotion of English around
the world, such as the British Council. An interesting way to see how much currency
imagination has among ELT professionals who participate in such events is to look at
conference programmes. Because of the scope and importance of the International
Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), and also because
this is the Teachers’ Association which is most influential in my own professional
context, the objects of my investigation are the programmes of the 2005-09 Annual
Conferences. IATEFL Annual Conferences involve a 3.5 or 4-day programme of over
300 talks, workshops and symposiums (hppt://www.iatefl.org). Considering these five
consecutive years we can see that there are an increasing number of presentations
related to classroom techniques and activities using songs, drama, storytelling,
literature, images, and also the virtual worlds of Second Life and electronic games (Fig.
2). It is worth noticing that at Cardiff 2009 there was a symposium especially devoted to
Art in ELT. However, there were no presentations on the possible role of imagination
and creativity in teacher education, with the possible exception of Littlewood’s
‘Metaphors for teachers in Cambodia and Hong Kong’, also at Cardiff 2009.

Presentations related to imaginative, creative content No (out of approx. 300)

Cardiff 2005 10
Harrogate 2006 14
Aberdeen 2007 13
Exeter 2008 11
Cardiff 2009 24

Figure 2. Imaginative and creative content in presentations at IATEFL Annual Conferences.

20
It is quite clear that the pattern observed in the publishing industry is similar to the one
related to the content of presentations, i.e., there seems to be a consensus about the need
to discuss and produce imaginative and creative material for language teaching and
learning but there is little or no interest in a discussion of the role of imagination in the
development of teachers themselves. The scope of this study does not allow me to
investigate the programmes of other major conferences around the world but,
considering my experience attending ELT conferences in Latin America, I very much
suspect that the picture would be comparable to the one we find at IATEFL.

3. TESOL INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION (ITE)

It remains to investigate if the same tendency is present at ITE programmes. It is

virtually impossible to draw accurate conclusions about it due to the overwhelming
number of undergraduate Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
courses being taught at education colleges and universities around the world. What we
can do is to look at the syllabuses of some of these courses in the hope that this will
reveal some general trend in some specific contexts. The contexts I chose are the ones I
feel more familiar with, that is, the international TESOL diploma courses, the Bachelor
of Education (BEd) syllabus at Marjon and the TESOL Bachelor of Arts (BA) syllabus
of two Brazilian universities in the region of the country where I come from. Once
again, it is important to emphasise that with such a small sample we cannot infer that
the same pattern is present in other ITE courses around the world. The examples here
serve just as illustrations of the reality with which I have professional contact.

3.1 Diploma Courses

The market of TESOL short diploma courses is unquestionably dominated by the

Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA)
and the Trinity College Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
(CertTESOL) (Barduhn and Johnson, 2009: 62). Both are introductory courses for
candidates who have little or no previous English Language teaching experience or
candidates with some teaching experience but little previous training. These courses are

21
usually taken by both English native speakers who want to obtain a quick qualification
to teach English abroad and non-native speaker EFL teachers who seek to obtain an
internationally recognised qualification to improve their career prospects. There is quite
a lot of controversy and criticism regarding the efficiency and suitability of such courses
to prepare people to teach EFL (Brandt, 2006; Ferguson and Donno, 2003), but it is
undeniable that they can provide some training where otherwise none would be given
and that they can be a first step towards further later and more mainstream academic
teaching qualifications.

Once again the knowledge and skill development model of teacher education is
embodied in the concern for the development of micro-teaching skills, with emphasis on
presentation skills and classroom management techniques, which reveals the strong
influence of competency-based training. This is in turn coupled with a marked tendency
towards analysis and reproduction of supposedly effective teaching practices and focus
on knowledge of and about the English language. There is no reference in the courses
handbooks to the exercise of imagination and/or creativity by the trainee teacher.
Moreover, the use of language, especially in the Cambridge CELTA programme
(http://www.cambridgeesol.org/exams/teaching-awards/celta.html), is quite revealing in
this aspect, since the verbs that are most frequently used in the list of learning outcomes
are ‘identify’ and ‘demonstrate.’

3.2 Undergraduate courses

At the moment, there are over fifty undergraduate Malaysian students at Marjon who
come to the UK for two years as part of their 4-year BEd Teaching English Second
Language (TESL)/Primary Programme sponsored by the Malaysian Ministry of
Education. When I explained the topic of this study to one of my friends doing this
course she looked clearly puzzled and asked, ‘But at this age and doing a BEd are we
supposed to deal with imagination in our own courses? Isn’t this for young learners?
Her reaction and her views of the role of imagination are not different from the
experiences and expectations I had on the matter myself, and which I mentioned in the
introduction to this chapter. Somehow, at some point in our educational lives someone
apparently draws a line separating the territories of imagination and creativity and

22
‘serious’ learning (Fisher, 1990: 30). Imagination is seen as being for young learners,
whereas adult learning is solely intellectual, analytical, and rational. We will deal with
the philosophical roots and implications of such views in Chapters Two and Three but
for now it suffices to say that such perceptions towards a possible place and role of
imagination in teacher education are quite common ground in our Western contexts, and
apparently in most Eastern ones as well.

I have examined the syllabus of three TESOL undergraduate courses, (a) the Link
Degree Project BEd (Hons) TESL/Primary Programme at Marjon, (b) the ‘Licenciatura
Dupla em Português e Inglês’ at the ‘Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande to
Sul’ (PUCRS) (http://www.pucrs.br/uni/poa/fale/ ) , and (c) the ‘Licenciatura Letras –
Inglês e Literaturas’ at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM)
(http://w3.ufsm.br/prograd/cursos/LICENCIATURA%20LETRAS%20INGLES%20E
%20LITERATURAS/ ), which is the institution where I studied for my undergraduate
degree. All these programmes include foundational modules on methodology of foreign
language teaching, the philosophy and psychology of education, classroom studies and
research, development of language skills and a practicum. The Brazilian programmes
rely heavily on reading and textual production, theories of reading, phonetics,
morphology and literary studies.

A serious note of warning is necessary here though. Even with the content of Initial
Teacher Education (ITE) programmes excluding overt references to imagination, it does
not necessarily follow that the teacher trainers’ approach in class is not imaginative.
Teacher trainers working on such courses may well introduce tasks involving
imagination and creativity in their own sessions and propose the discussion of such
issues in their sessions with their trainee teachers. We have no way of knowing the
extent to which imagination is actually present in the everyday sessions of student
teachers without an ethnographic study in each of these institutions. Nothing in the
Marjon’s MEd programme handbook would ever prepare us for the view of the walls of
Room 170. These things are not stated in programmes. They depend on the trainers’
own views and understanding of what is important in teacher education, which makes
the whole discussion of the role of imagination in teacher development even more
indispensable.

23
SUMMARY

In this chapter I have examined the current state of imagination and creativity in three
major areas associated with the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language:
professional publications (resource books, books for teachers, journals and academic
literature), the programmes of a major international EFL conference and the syllabus of
diploma and undergraduate courses in TESOL. I believe it is not so far-fetched to say
that even thought there is a considerable concern for providing teachers with the
creative and imaginative tools to facilitate language learning, the discussion of the role
of imagination in the professional development of teachers themselves is almost entirely
forgotten and, perhaps, historically and philosophically neglected. It is the investigation
of the reasons for such state of affairs regarding imagination in education that will be
subject of our attention in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER TWO

Understandings of Imagination

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare, W. (1988)

INTRODUCTION

Each story has a beginning, a middle and end, and even though these do not necessarily
come in this order, I will follow Aristotle’s instructions to tragedy writers in part VII of
the Poetics (1996: 38) and start a story of imagination from the beginning. In Chapter
One we saw that the current state and status of imagination in EFL circles is something
of a luxury. To understand why imagination does not seems to be considered a key
element in EFL teacher education we have to begin by looking at how imagination has
been viewed in Western philosophical thinking throughout history and how these ways
of seeing it have influenced ELT teacher education models. In this chapter we will: (a)
inspect the general notions of imagination in its different manifestations, (b) narrate a
story of imagination in Western culture as it emerged through history, from ancient
biblical and classical myths to contemporary times, and (c) examine how these
historical developments in the philosophical understanding of imagination inform the
fundamental principles of teacher education models and the place of imagination in each
of them.

1. A GENERAL VIEW OF IMAGINATION

There is more in the discussion of imagination than meets the eye. The fundamental
reason to attempt a study of imagination in teacher education is my firm belief that
imagination is not something that is only manifest when teacher trainers use creative

25
material in their sessions or propose tasks which lead participants’ to employ their own
imagination and creativity. Imagination is the core principle that defines the way we see
the world, how we understand ourselves and how we act in society. Imagination is what
shapes human actions and responses to the self and to others, and what enables human
beings to communicate and change their world (Bronowsky, 1978: 32-5). Therefore, a
discussion of imagination should have an important role in teacher education, since
learning to teach necessarily engages the learner in a process of ‘personal meaning-
making’ and in the ‘participation in and membership of a culture of teachers’ (Malderez
and Wedell, 2007: 14-15) in particular socio-historical and cultural contexts that are
rarely stable .

1.1 Imagination and creativity

At the beginning of this study I frequently referred to both imagination and creativity
interchangeably, especially in my consideration of publications, programmes and
syllabuses. Now it is time to make a crucial distinction in the way I treat them and
justify my decision to devote the remainder of this work to the former, instead of to the
latter. Henceforth, I will focus almost exclusively on imagination, in spite of the fact
that creativity seems a far more straightforward concept than imagination. ‘To create’
implies an act of producing something new. There seems to be an immediate association
of creativity with something practical and tangible that makes it somehow easier to
grasp than the so perceived ‘abstract’ flights of imagination. This is perhaps one of the
reasons why Carter (2004) has preferred the word ‘creativity’ in his work about
everyday language, even when most of the generalisations he makes throughout the
book could equally apply to the concept of imagination. Pope (2005) points to the fact
that creation

can refer to a product or a process (a ‘creation’ and the ‘activity of creating’) and
can be attributed to divine and human agents as well as to nature and the
universe at large. (2005: 8)

A creative act results in a product and, therefore, it depends fundamentally on an agent.

The agent does not necessarily need to be human, since God and nature can be creative
agents. Although both Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions do refer to a metaphysical

26
source of imagination (Moser and Nat, 1995: 36; Stock, 1996: 54), we have never heard
or read that God ‘imagined’ the world but that he ‘created’ it. As the Gospel says, ‘In
the beginning there was the Word…Through him all things were made’ (John, 1: 1-3).
Moreover, we can speak of ‘human imagination’, but we cannot conceive of nature
imagining things. According to Fisher (1990),

Creativity is something creative persons use to make creative products.

…Creativity is also a collection of attitudes and abilities that lead to a person to
produce creative thoughts, ideas or images. (1990: 31) (My italics)

Creativity is, by its very linguistic nature, something productive. Carter (2004: 67) also
talks about ‘production’ in his differentiation between historical creativity (H-creativity)
and personal creativity (P-creativity). Cskszentmihalyi (1996: 6) writes about the three
‘elements’ necessary ‘for a creative idea, product or discovery to take place’ (my
italics). All things taken into consideration, my approach here is to treat creativity and
the resulting act of creating as the process through which imagination goes in order to
originate a new product. From now on, imagination will be at the very centre of this
study.

1.2 Imagination, subjectivity and reality

But what does the term ‘imagination’ designate? Strawson (1982: 82) believes that
imagination points to three areas of association: (a) the production of mental images,
i.e., a ‘picture in the mind’s eye’, (b) the invention and the production of something
original and innovative; and (c) the manifestations of ‘false belief, delusion, mistaken
memory or misperception.’ In a similar but more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon
of imagination Ricoeur (1994; 119-20) identifies four main uses for the term, which
broadly relate to Strawson’s categorisation. For him, imagination: (a) evokes ‘things
which are absent but which exist elsewhere’, (b) creates images to ‘take the place of
things they represent’, (c) invents non-existent things but is conscious of the fictional
nature of its creation, and (d) represents non-existent things in the ‘domain of illusion.’
However, Ricoeur does not see the manifestations of human imagination as products
packed into these four different boxes as philosophical theories have traditionally
wrapped and labelled them. On the contrary, he claims that manifestations of

27
imagination move along two different axes: one with regard to the presence and absence
of the object, the other with regard to the consciousness of the subject (Fig.3).

On one extreme of the object axis we have situations and objects that are present and
tangible at the moment we refer to them and which we can experience through our
senses. We can visualise, hear, touch, smell, taste them. Imagination at this level has the
function of reproducing ‘what is there’. For Hume, although imagination is free to a
certain extent, it ‘does not always join ideas at random’ (Warnock 1976: 16-17). On the
contrary, its freedom is limited by what it sees in the world, for imagination is what
transforms impressions of a particular and concrete experience into abstract thought. For
instance, the extent to which we can imagine changes in the activities we propose to our
learners is highly influenced and restricted by the conditions under which we are
working at any given moment. Imagination is what allows us to rethink these situations
and constraints and transform them into something similar. An example of reproductive
imagination in action is when teacher trainers adapt or modify texts and materials
available to them in a given course to suit the training situation at hand with that
specific group of participants.

On the other extreme of this same axis, we have the absence of situations and objects or
just mere references to them. What we have are just traces of reality in our minds:
memories, pictures formed in the ‘inward eye’. Imagination then has to produce what is
absent; its function is to refer to the other ‘that is not there’ and in doing so it creates
something else. An example of productive imagination is when teacher trainers design
new texts and materials to use with a hypothetical group of trainees based on their
previous knowledge of other teacher education resources and other groups of teachers
they have trained before.

The subject axis refers to the capacity of the person imagining to assume ‘a critical
awareness of the difference between the imaginary and the real’ (Ricoeur, 1994: 120).
On one pole of the axis we have a heightened critical consciousness of the real and are
able to penetrate reality with a critical view. Imagination here is an instrument of
critique of reality. An example of critical imagination is when teacher trainers analyse
teacher training situations trying to ‘see’ through the behaviour, language and attitudes
of participants, the socio-historical and cultural factors that are ‘unobservable’, but

28
which deeply influence what happens in the training room (Wright, 2005: 14-16), and,
based on this imaginative insight, adapt materials and approaches to their training
context.

On the other pole of this axis, the boundaries between real and imaginary become
blurred. This state of indistinctiveness leads to what Ricoeur calls ‘fascinated
consciousness’ (Ricoeur, 1994: 120). Its extreme manifestation is schizophrenia under
which condition a person completely loses their sense of reality. Nonetheless, a certain
degree of fascinated imagination is necessary in life for it is this sort of imagination that
allows us to picture different possibilities to those we have previously experienced or
are experiencing at the moment. It allows us to imagine possible changes in reality and
potential new worlds. Without it, there can be no change. We will return to the role of
imagination in educational change in Chapter Three. For now, a practical example of
fascinated imagination in a teacher education context is when trainers are able to step
into the shoes of participants and try to see their problems and difficulties from their
point of view. This is when you try to see things not entirely as yourself but as the other
- the boundaries of subjectivity are blurred.

Although Ricoeur did not have education specifically in mind when he wrote his article,
let alone EFL teacher education, his concern with discourse, action and commitment to
a poetics of ethical ‘historical imagination’ (Kearney, 1988: 393) has profound practical
implications for teacher educators. The figure below gives us examples of how moving
along Ricoeur’s axes affects our ‘mundane’ business of teaching teachers (Fig. 3). It
also helps us to see that philosophical concepts are not simply abstractions but actually
inform all our actions. Understanding the historical and theoretical roots of our teacher
education practices is a first step in becoming a reflective practitioner (Brookfield,
1995: 36-39) for only when we are able to see the connections between ourselves, our
predecessors and successors we can understand the ties that bond us and how we can
break or renew them (Ricouer, 1994: 127-8).

29
 Present
Reproductive imagination
(Representations of sensory experience)

Able to adapt and modify

Able to analyse critically
materials available and
transform them to fit the
trainees’ socio-cultural
contexts
available texts and materials
Able to adapt and modify
O available activities &
B procedures

Able to deal critically

J Able to propose multiple
and creatively with E solutions to familiar problems
situations at hand in the C Unconscious
Conscious training context while T Able to look at problems and
activities and sessions situations at hand from multiple Fascinated
Critical develop angles Imagination
Imagination (Boundaries
(Imagination between reality
as critique and illusion
of reality) Able to connect training are blurred)
room events with the SUBJECT
wider socio-historical,
economic and cultural Able to create and develop
contexts new texts and materials

Able to create scenarios Able to design and

for possible courses of
actions and analyse
possible responses to
them before
implementation of a plan
or syllabus
Able to predict
participants’ reactions to
materials and procedures,
playing them in your
mind to be able to make
better informed decisions
conceive new activities and
procedures
Able to propose
unexpected solutions to
familiar and unfamiliar
problems
Able to predict possible
problems and situations
and propose multiple and
unusual solutions

Absent
Productive imagination
(Representations of otherness)

Figure 3: Examples of manifestations of teacher trainers’ imagination along the object-

subject axes. (Based on Ricoeur, 1994: 119-20)

30
2. A STORY OF IMAGINATION IN THE WEST

Some clarification is necessary at this stage about the content of this chapter. Although
our main concern will always be aspects related to teacher education, we cannot
understand the presence or absence of a discussion of imagination in teacher education
without relating it to the disciplines of philosophy, theology, history (Appendix A) and
literary studies (Appendix B). Apart from a few ELT titles (Howatt with Widdownson,
2004; Crook, 2009), it is normal to see the story of ELT retold as an orderly succession
of methodologies, from grammar-translation to the communicative approach and on to
critical pedagogies, without a more careful consideration of how these methods and
approaches are influenced by whole systems of thought. Conversely, an examination of
the trajectory of imagination in Western thinking can help us to see how such ideas have
been influential in our understanding of the relationships between imagination and
knowledge in different teaching models and in our classroom management strategies.

The linear chronological approach to a story of imagination adopted in the structure of

this narrative does not mean that we should understand the conceptualisation of
imagination as a neat progressive sequence, moving from the onto-theological pre-
modern view, through the humanistic modern approach and towards a more nihilistic
post-modern interpretation. On the contrary, we should keep in mind that the seeds of a
later view of any concept or theory are already sowed in the previous ones, and that
there may be people in our post-modern times who still have pre-modern or modern
understandings of what imagination is (Kearney, 1988: 19-20) and how it is manifest in
our personal lives and in our teacher training theories and practices.

2.1 Pre-modern imagination: from Ancient to Medieval Times

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And God said, Let us
make man in our image, after our likeness
Genesis, 1.1.1–26

No narrative of Western imagination can ignore the far-reaching influence of the

Adamic myth of creation. This influence extends throughout the history of Western

31
philosophy: from the Judaeo tradition, to medieval Church scholasticism, well into the
18th century Romantic movement. According to the biblical Book of Genesis, Adam, the
first man, was created in God’s image and is, therefore, but a product of His
imagination. In fact, the Genesis and the myth of the Garden of Eden can be seen as a
narrative of the Fall caused by Adam and Eve’s realisation that human imaginative
power could imitate that of their creator. In pursuing the right to exercise a conscious
imagination our first parents started seeing the world in terms of opposites – good and
evil, past and future, God and man. According to Kearney (1988),

Adam’s transgressive act of imagination represents the alienation of God’s

original creation from itself – the splitting up of the pre-lapsarian unity of
Paradise into the antithetical orders of divine eternity and human mortality.
(1988: 40)

From the very beginning, imagination was not a good thing. The biblical creation myth
is a cautionary tale about the destructive powers of imagination and how the possession
of knowledge has led humanity to shame, guilt and death. Kearney (1988: 39-61)
performs an extensive and comprehensive analysis of the Adamic myth and its
influence in the constructs of imagination we have developed in the West, both in its
negative and positive sides. He summarises the four properties of the Hebraic concept of
imagination, as follows,

1. As mimetic (a human imitation of the divine act of creation)

2. As ethical (a choice between good and evil)
3. As historical (a projection of future possibilities of existence)
4. As anthropological (an activity proper to man which differentiates him from
both a higher divine order and a lower animal order and which opens up a
freedom of becoming beyond the necessity of cosmic being). (1988:53)

As Bruner (1986: 108-9) points out in his discussion of language and reality, from the
dawn of Western thought our understanding of imagination and knowledge has been
entangled with notions of revelation and faith. Throughout our history we have
struggled to either fuse them again or dissociate them for good. It would be to go too far
to say that teachers and teacher educators are aware of these influences in their own
attitudes towards imagination. The Adamic myth lies deep below the surface of Breen’s

32
coral gardens (2001: 128) but it does come to the surface in some of our educational
practices, as we will see in the discussion of teacher education practices and models.

Neither the Judaeo-Christian nor the Greek traditions have helped imagination to earn a
good reputation. Human imagination in both cases is viewed as an act of defiance
against a divine established order (Kearney, 1988: 80-4). In the former, it was a Child’s
act of disobedience against the Father; in the latter, robbery. The Hellenic understanding
of imagination is narrated in the myth of Prometheus where the Titan rebels against
Zeus, steals fire from the gods, gives it to the humans and is, accordingly, punished.
Prometheus is chained to a rock to have his liver devoured by an eagle, the symbol of
Zeus, in an apparently changeable but forever repeating cycle of pain-death-rebirth-
pain. In giving the fire of the gods to humans Prometheus gave them the means to use
their imagination to transform nature and create art. It is quite revealing that in English
we can say ‘set one’s imagination on fire.’ According to Kearny,

Hellenic culture has provided Western philosophy, with most of its formative
concepts. Along with the biblical tradition of the Judaeo-Christian revelation, the
Greek heritage of speculation has exercising and enduring influence, at almost
every level, on the development of European civilisation. This influence extends,
of course, to the understanding of imagination. (1988: 79)

For the Greek philosophers, imagination is deeply connected to knowledge and a

discussion of imagination in teacher education needs to take into consideration
philosophical views of the interplay between knowledge and imagination. For Plato
(427-347 BC) what we see in the world and our knowledge of it is nothing but illusion.
We are all chained inside a cave looking at shadows moving on the wall and thinking
that what we see is real. The Platonic allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic
(Plato, 1997: 196) is another tale of a failed human imagination which, as in the
traditional Hebrew Talmudic stories of the Golem and in Shelley’s (2004) Gothic novel
Frankenstein, produces just a mock version of the divine creation and distorted
representations of the transcendental, immutable realm of the pure forms. The sensory
world, i.e., the things we can see, hear, touch and taste, are just changeable imaginary
inferior versions of the transcendental perfect Being (Abbs, 1996: 41). While reason can
uplift the veil of reality and allow us to contemplate truth; ‘imagination is relegated to
the most inferior form of human opinion’ (Kearney, 1988: 90).

33
Aristotle (384-322 BC), another extremely influential Greek philosopher, endorses
Plato’s view that truth resides in a metaphysical realm and that knowledge is only of
what is immutable. However, for him knowledge of the world can only be acquired
through the things we experience through our senses for ‘forms exist in physical
objects, not in a Platonic realm independent of the sensory world’ (Moses and Nat,
1995: 36). Aristotle has no problems to accommodate imagination and give it a positive
role in society, for he maintains that ideas are not disembodied abstractions but
‘categories of human thought which correspond…to the forms of the real world’ as
perceived by our senses and mediated through images (Kearney, 1988: 109) For
Aristotle it is the active human mind that, using imagination, is able to make all things,
analyse, judge and see the truth beyond the images (Aristotle, 1986: 204).

It is an illusion to think that we can understand Western thought and imagination

without acknowledging how it has been largely dominated by a blending of biblical
narrative and Greek philosophy and myth (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001: 3). This peculiar
combination of apparently contradictory belief systems only became possible because of
the synthesising powers of the imagination of two influential medieval scholars,
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. This onto-theological synthesis was not very good
news for imagination, though. As Kearny (1988) points out,

The alliance served to deepen the traditional suspicion of imagination: it

combined and consolidated a) the biblical condemnation of imagination as
transgression of the divine order of Creation…and b) the metaphysical critique
of imagination as counterfeit of the original truth of Being. (1988:117)

What medieval scholasticism did was to try to amalgamate the two traditions and offer a
theory of knowledge, imagination and the self that reconciled the Hebraic belief in the
God of Revelation and the Platonic metaphysical understanding of a transcendental
source of Being. Augustine (354-430 AD), a Roman-African theologian and
philosopher, was heavily influenced by Plato and his theory of imagination conforms to
the idea of mimesis. However, unlike Plato who perceived all human narratives as
untruthful and deceiving, Augustine was ready to concede that some narratives could
help us to achieve self-understanding. In fact, for Augustine knowledge of the world
and of the self depends on language because we can only understand ourselves through
narrative. However,

34
 Inasmuch as our self-understanding begins and ends with our words, that source
of can only exist outside the circle of language - in some metalinguistic and
therefore metaphysical realm. (Stock, 1996:54)

For Augustine this source of metaphysical superior knowledge is God. If God is the
supreme Narrator, the ultimate source of Truth, and human history is an ethically
oriented master narrative, interpretation of the Text cannot be a matter of individual
opinion. Augustine believed that the problem with narratives is that human imagination
may lead different members of an audience to construct different interpretations of a
story. As the whole belief system of the Christian faith rests on the words of the biblical
narrative, this is a vital point. The solution for this immense potential danger was to
restrain imagination. Interpretation of the Word was the prerogative of the prophets and,
of course, of the Church theologians like himself. The production of sacred images also
had to follow strict canonical rules since images are just notions of the things
themselves stored in our memories and to represent the divine they have to be
supervised by reason (Augustine, 1998: 186).

Following Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century a Dominican priest from Italy,
also recognises the importance of images as mediators between the metaphysical source
of knowledge (God) and the limited human understanding of it. Imagination has its role
as long as it keeps its mimetic and storage functions, and ‘any departure from its
mandatory subordination to reason and reality, can only lead to error – and, at worst,
satanic pride’ (Kearney 1988: 130). These understandings of knowledge and
imagination would have a profound and overwhelming influence in the West for the
centuries to come until our present times and constitute the philosophical bases of the
didactic model.

2.2 Modern imagination: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The incontestable influence of the onto-theological synthesis of the biblical and Platonic
philosophies only started to decline in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery of the
works of Aristotle, the invention of the printing press and the Reformation, the 16th
century religious movement that challenged the supremacy of the Roman Catholic
Church. This period, known as the Renaissance, marks the transition from a pre-modern

35
to a modern understanding of imagination. The well-constructed edifice of Judaeo-
Christian medieval master narrative started to collapse early in Renaissance times.
Plato’s influence started to fade when new translations of Aristotle’s works, preserved
in Arabic translations from Greek manuscripts lost at the destruction of the library in
Alexandria, became available in Europe. According to Abbs (1996), Aristotle’s works
sowed the seeds of rationalism that was to emerge after the Renaissance and

laid the foundations of empirical science, continually insisting that every

hypothesis be tested by all the available evidence and recognising the need for
constant collection and systematic classification. (1996: 38)

Furthermore, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the reproduction of the
text, made possible by the invention of the mechanical printing press by Gutenberg
around 1439, changed fundamentally the relationship between the text, the author and
the reader. It is little wonder that so many lives and reputations were at stake, in both
senses, because of the translation of the Bible. If God’s words could be translated into
other languages, the natural connection between word, symbol and meaning would be
forever broken. What is more, if anyone could read it and reproduce it, it meant that
anyone could potentially interpret it without depending on the Church’s official
exegesis. What Gutenberg (1398-1468), Martin Luther (1483-1546)) and the Tudor
scholar William Tyndale (1494 – 1536), who produced the first translation of the Bible
into Early Modern English, did was to subvert a 1,500-year hierarchy of knowledge and
to set Europe’s imagination on fire (Greenblatt, 1984: 74-114). This was a period of
visible changes and, as Appleby et al (1996) put it,

Somewhere between Galileo Galilei’s looking into his telescope and European
investors pouring money and slaves into the commercial cultivation of sugar in
the West Indies, the modern era began. (1996: 3)

This era ‘officially’ lasted until the German philosopher Kant (1724-1804) announced
that the ‘use of one’s reason’ should be free and ‘it alone’ could ‘bring about
enlightenment among men’ (Kant, 1996: 107). Classical modern philosophers rejected
Aristotelian rationalism, which dominated late medieval and renaissance times, and
instead proclaimed that

36
 knowledge of reality is obtained through the direct awareness of the forms that
constitute the essence of the objects of senses. They replaced that view with the
position that we indirectly represent the world through sense experience and
conceptualisation. (Moser and Nat, 1995: 109) (Emphasis on the original)

For the French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650), and other modern philosophers after
him, the long-standing problem to be solved above all others was ‘the relation between
ideas in my head and things which apparently are not in my head but in the outside
world’ (Warnock 1976: 13). For Descartes absolute mathematical certainty about the
world, achieved ‘by long chains of simple and easy reasonings’ (Descartes, 1998: 11), is
the only form of knowledge that is worth pursuing. Furthermore, in Descartes’
philosophy, also called Cartesian rationalism, there is no correspondence between the
physical and the symbolic worlds - the traditional symbols that connected nature and
man and regulated life should be erased and replaced by a new scientific view of the
world. If there is no place for symbols in the rationalistic dualistic division between
nature and human, it follows that neither the arts nor imagination have a role in the task
of understanding the world. And nor, by inference, in understanding and promoting
teacher education, which becomes thus a matter of training teachers to reproduce tested
and approved methods and techniques whose efficiency can be easily measured.

Even partaking with rationalism the belief that knowledge can be verifiable through
reason and science, the English empiricism of Locke (1632-1704) and Hume (1711-
1776) differs from rationalism to the extent that it has a role for imagination in the
process of trying to comprehend reality. Hume, a Scottish philosopher, economist and
historian, defines ideas as images and ‘regards imagination, the image-making faculty,
as playing a crucial role in our thinking’ since imagination has an ‘essential role’ in
forming the belief that objects exist in the world even when we are not experiencing
them through our senses. For him, ‘imagination enters into our most ordinary perception
of the world’ (Warnock, 1976:15-21). Kant, writing in the late Enlightenment (18th
century), believed that the world existed in a place and time outside ourselves and that it
is empirical imagination that makes us associate the objects in the external world with
our previous (a priori) internal knowledge of them. Kant (2003: 91-4) states that it is
imagination which is responsible for organising the totally chaotic and disorganised
world of sensory experience and synthesising it to our abstract concepts or thoughts. For
the liberal Enlightenment philosophers, imagination was thus the servant of reason.

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Reaction against rationalistic, empiricist views of knowledge and imagination did not
take long to come and, unsurprisingly, it came in the voice of two English poets,
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Their
Romantic view of imagination is as opposed in nature to rationalism as the humanistic
approach to education is to the competency-based, managerial approach to teacher
education.

2.3 Romantic imagination: from Georgian to Victorian Times

He holds him with his glittering eye –

The wedding guest stood still,
And listens like a three year’s child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Coleridge, S. T (1848)

It is the light in the Mariner’s glittering eye that makes the wedding guest stop and hear
the story and, as the wedding guest, we are also hooked by the poet’s imagination which
sheds his light on our own imagination. For if the metaphor for the classical and early
modern imagination is a mirror that ‘reflects and re-presents some other reality’; the
metaphor for the Romantic imagination is the lamp that ‘generates and radiates its own
heat and light’ (Pope, 2005: 15-16). ‘The Rime’ was published in the Lyrical Ballads, a
collection of Wordsworth and Coleridge’ poems, whose 1800 edition’s Preface is
actually a poetic manifesto that marks the official beginning of Romanticism. It is
beyond the scope of this study to analyse the profound significance of the works of
Wordsworth and Coleridge for both literature and literary criticism, but we cannot
proceed with a discussion of imagination without considering their enormous
contribution and historical relevance to our understanding of imagination. In the
Preface, Wordsworth states that ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 2005: 307). For the Romantics, the poet is the
major generational locus of art, and poetry is the ‘internal impulse’ of feeling made
external and ‘embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts and
feelings’ (Abrams, 1953: 21-2). Whereas rationalism and empiricism hold that reality is
outside, in the matter-of-fact objective observable world, Coleridge insists that ‘the
poet’s eye is not the observer’s eye, but the mind’s eye’, which is ‘directed inwards’

38
(McGrann, 1989: 240). For Coleridge, imagination is some sort of energy working
inside the individual that enables him/her to see in the external world some meaning
that is not in the object or in the symbol themselves. Meaning is not there to be
discovered and chartered; meaning is given to reality by the power of active
imagination. Individual imagination, because of its ‘synthetic and magical’ ‘combining
power’ (Coleridge, 1985: 295), is able to create by itself a ‘significant universe and to
some limited extent grasp those ideas of reason which inform whatever we see and hear’
(Warnock, 1976: 83-97). In his most controversial and most quoted passage on
imagination, Coleridge establishes a direct connection between the creative power of a
transcendental Creator and human imagination. It reads,

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary or secondary. The

primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all
human Perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former,
co-existing with the conscious will, yet as identical with the primary, and
differing only in degree and in mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate…It is essentially vital, even if all objects (as
objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (Coleridge, 1985: 304)

For Coleridge, the primary imagination is the power that holds everything together and
enables us to apprehend objects in nature according to a transcendental reference point.
It is primary imagination that allows humans to ‘re-enact God’s original and eternal
creative moment’ whereas secondary imagination is what ‘revitalizes that world’
(Wordsworth, 1985: 25) making it anew. Secondary imagination is ‘that power of mind
that allows us to summon images’ (McFarland, 1985: 121) whether a correspondent
external object is present or not and allow us to transform, deconstruct and recreate.
Although Coleridge’s description of primary imagination is all grandiose, it is the
secondary that actually has precedence over the primary, because it is the work of
secondary imagination that ‘transforms the fixed objects in the full freedom of artistic
invention’ (Kearney, 1988: 184).

Romanticism tried to blend the pre-modern belief in a metaphysical source of

imagination to a new acquired belief in the power of humans to shape nature and their
world, but it does so placing individual subjectivity where rationalism and empiricism
had previously placed objective reality, at the centre of the process. As romanticism was

39
a reaction to the extremes of the objectivism, excess of subjectivity and focus on the
individual as the sole source of meaning led philosophers at the beginning of the
twentieth century to start questioning the very concept of subjective identity. Such
speculations are the foundation of the deconstruction of self and the advent of the
postmodern concepts of imagination. In ELT education, post-modern understandings of
imagination are translated into the emergence of critical pedagogies.

2.4 Postmodern imagination: from the 20th century to present times

The modern eighteen and nineteenth centuries’ optimism and confidence in the
supremacy of human imagination over nature and its belief in the ability of science and
technology to create progress and prosperity (Claxton, 1999: 122) did not survive the
twentieth century. It was shattered by two World Wars, the Holocaust, the creation of
the atomic bomb and the Cold War (Schön, 1983:4). It also created an era of
consumerism; mass reproduction of ‘art’ and manipulation of images (Barthes, 1977).
For postmodern philosophers the individual is no longer the origin of imagination
because individual imagination is nothing more than an amalgam of ideas conveyed by
the media and by new technologies that create and manipulate image and language,
which are but copies of each other without a single original point of reference. The
metaphors of the mirror and the lamp to describe the pre-modern and the modern
visions of imagination are then replaced by the metaphor of the labyrinth of looking
glasses to describe the postmodern ‘parodic imagination.’ As Kearney (1988) puts it,

Deprived of the concept of origin, the concept of imagination itself collapses.

For imagination always presupposed the idea of origination: the derivation of
our images from some original presence. … The postmodern paradigm is, in
other words, that of a labyrinth of mirrors which extend infinitely in all
directions – a labyrinth where the image of the self (as a presence to itself)
dissolves in self-parody. (1988: 253)

Postmodern imagination is a tale of many deaths. Obviously, the first one to die, already
in late nineteenth century, was God himself (Nietzsche, 1961: 297) and with him the
idea of the Judaeo-Christian and Greek metaphysical sources of imagination and
Coleridge’s ‘infinite I AM’. Second in line was the Romantic subject who was eroded
by the advent of psychology in late Victorian times, splitting what was believed to be a

40
single human identity into the conscious and unconscious parts of the self (Freud, 2007;
Homer, 2005). Moreover, what we understood by individual subjectivity – ideas,
feelings, beliefs, desires – was then described by the Marxist philosopher Althusser
(1918-1990) as the mere product of the economic structure and politico-cultural
superstructures prevailing in the historical context where the individual lives (Montag,
2003). Coleridge’s ‘finite mind’ was, therefore, definitely pronounced dead. It was just
a matter of time until the official announcement of the ‘death of man’ (Foucault, 2001:
330-73). For postmodernists, human subjectivity is actually a pre-conditioned creation
without a central point of reference, a collection of many others. ‘Foucault’s ideas
imply a constituted subject and perhaps one with multiple and shifting identities’
(Crooks, 2009: 106). If there is no subject with a single identity which can be given a
location and a name, the whole idea of individual creation disappears. The next casualty
was, not surprisingly, ‘the author.’ The French philosopher Barthes (1977: 142-7)
asserts that both the creative imaginative subject and the collective imaginary are just
myths. Consequently, a work of literature cannot be considered the expression of a
single creative subject, but a cultural creation which is an impersonal play of linguistic
signs. For example, Shakespeare’s plays are not considered Shakespeare’s plays
anymore, simply because there is no Shakespeare, at least not as an imaginative
consciousness. The author is dead and so is authorial imagination. Such
defragmentation of the individual subject and focus on the social construction of the self
are at the very roots of the social constructivism and new critical approaches to teacher
education.

3. THEORY AND PRACTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Philosophical understandings of imagination are not just a matter of theory and abstract
intellectual speculation. On the contrary, they are embedded in the teacher education
practices and models that we adopt and defend. Theories are simply attempts to
articulate in a systematic way the experiences and problems that puzzle all of us. They
are meant to ‘simplify life’ and ‘enable us to see the wood for the tree, the patterns of
relationships and causality in events’ (Mercer 1995, 64). In this section we will look at
how major Western philosophical systems translate into our ELT teacher education
practices and models.

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3.1. Pre-modern imagination and the didactic model

The Adamic myth has far-reaching pedagogical influences and affects the way we view
order and control in classroom management (Wright, 2005: 117-22). The Hebraic
understanding that human imagination can challenge the ‘natural’ source of power and
knowledge and lead to disruption comes to the surface every time we hear teachers
saying that they do not dare to propose roleplay or drama activities in the classroom
because they will not be able to maintain ‘discipline’. The moment you open the garden
gates to students’ imagination you do not know what our little Adams and Eves might
create and how they could threaten the harmony of your classroom.

The influence of the Hebraic narrative of imagination can never be underrated. From the
Genesis to Milton’s ‘darkly attractive’, ‘well-justified’ defiant Satan (Pope, 2005: 166)
in Paradise Lost (2005), the biblical myth of the Creation has contributed to the subtle
presence in Western view of a potentially rebellious, dark side of imagination. It does
emerge to the surface when you hear stories like the one told by one of my MEd
colleagues who was reproached by her school teacher for painting a rose in blue and
thus showing complete disregard for the mimetic property of imagination. The act of
thinking of a different colour for a rose is the act of rethinking creation and thus an act
of challenging the authority of the knowledge the teacher possess. After all, teachers
‘know’ that roses are not blue and their role is to make sure that this knowledge is
passed on to their little pupils. It is the pre-modern understanding of knowledge that is
at the basis of transmission teaching models, where the ‘teacher controls all aspects of
the learning context’ (Wright, 2005: 193).

More than anywhere else it is in the complex issue of agency over knowledge in
teaching that philosophical views of imagination have their most elusive and far-
reaching consequences. For instance, the Platonic negative view of imagination is at the
very root of the distrust in the illusionary world of the arts, since painting, music, and
poetry are just pale imperfect copies created by human imagination of something that
can never be truly represented. There was no place for poets in Plato’s perfect society of
The Republic because all poets are liars who colour reality with their ‘names and words’
whilst they understand nothing themselves (Plato, 1997: 286). Platonic idealism is the
philosophical system that sustains an educational tradition that Crooks (2009: 88-9)

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calls Perennialism. If the changeable world cannot be trusted and truth resides only in
what is permanent, the job of education is to transmit the ‘best’ and ‘unchangeable’
values of the culture, which are then seen as timeless and perennial. Consequently, the
teacher education curriculum and the pedagogical practices should place strong
emphasis on the authority of well-established authors who preferably have no business
with the fancies of unstable, ambivalent imagination, but who, instead, base their
training methods on ‘solid’, ‘traditional’ principles. It is not the job of the teacher
trainer to propose tasks and readings that will engage trainee teachers’ imagination and
transform them into ‘agents of deception’ and ‘liars’. On the contrary, the role of the
teacher trainer is to ensure that the ‘true’ and ‘stable’ values of their professional culture
will be passed on to a new generation of teachers and that educational change will
remain at the level of the visible, superficial world, without affecting the core of the
educational system. Such philosophical views are so subtly entrenched in our way of
seeing the world that they usually go undetected in our teacher education practices. For
instance, you may decide to bring a poem to your next training session to include some
imaginative content to your teacher education syllabus, but then gladly provide
participants with its ‘true’ and ‘timeless’ interpretation.

Knowing how influential Christian scholasticism was in the history of Western thought
we do not need a lot of fascinated imagination to see where some of our educational
practices come from. The didactic teaching model, in which the tutor is the only
authorised source of knowledge and the one responsible for the interpretation of the
texts, has its deepest roots in the neo-Platonic medieval understanding of imagination.
Knowledge is not questioned but transmitted by a tutor who is also the one who defines
the needs, the stimulus and what knowledge is relevant. Tutors and teacher trainers thus
become instruments of the curriculum and the ‘gatekeepers’ to the profession (Wright,
2005: 145). There is no place here for imagination and individual interpretation.
Divergent, unusual, individual, non-conformist thinking is certainly not encouraged
(Rowland, 1998: 21). Residues of Augustinian and Thomistic philosophies are still
present in ‘native-speaker expert’ teacher trainer fallacy (Rampton, 1990: 97-101;
Phillipson, 1992: 12-18). It is not uncommon to be present at conferences where well-
prepared and interesting presentations are attended by a few delegates while almost
everybody else flocks to the rooms where native speakers, well-renowned ‘experts’ are
presenting; not necessarily because their topic is more interesting or relevant than the

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others, which may certainly be the case, but mainly because of the authority that their
familiarity with the language - the main means to achieve knowledge, according to
Augustine - and their closeness to the sources of that generate knowledge - the almost
metaphysical ivory towers of academia in BANA countries (Holliday, 1994: 3-11) -
confer to them. The pre-modern understanding of knowledge and imagination is the
foundation stone upon which the didactic model of teaching lies (Rowland, 1998: 19-
22; Wright, 2005: 192-6) and which van Lier (1996: 178-84) labels as monologic,
authoritarian, externally controlled, asymmetrical, non-contingent and elliptic. In this
model teachers/teacher educators are the ones who hold the keys that open the gates of
knowledge and give access to professional success and advancement. Actually, even the
metaphor of a gatekeeper to the profession is a reference to the Roman Church
reinterpretation of Matthew, 16:19. The discourse used by ‘experts’ in the didactic
model is vertically oriented, since concepts and experiences are encoded in abstract
terms (Wright, 2005: 44) which exclude the ones who do not have access to the
specialised language.

3.2 Modern imagination and the scientific approaches

With the Reformation, control over vertical discourse was challenged and democratised,
even if to a very limit extent. Interpretation of the Bible ceased to be vertically
transmitted by those in power and a fellow believer’s interpretation could have even
more force and legitimacy than the one received from the Church scholars. Since the
Renaissance and the Reformation knowledge has become contested and discourse
grown to be more horizontally oriented (Bernstein, 1996: 170). Living in the ‘age of
information technology’, we are in a privileged position to try to understand the
magnitude of the Renaissance revolution in the way knowledge was controlled and
transmitted because in our own times we are witnessing another major revolution in the
way it is possessed and disseminated. With the advent of the Internet and the possibility
of publishing online in blogs and wikis and through self-publishing websites, the
absolute control exercised by publishing companies over what is written, read and
printed is being severely eroded.
Rationalism and empiricism, which emerged in the Enlightenment, are the philosophical
systems that sustained what Lakoff and Johnson (2003, 186-8) call ‘the myth of

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Objectivism.’ The myth of objectivism says that the world is made of objects which
have inherent properties independently of other people and things, and that we can
acquire the knowledge of such objects and their properties as long as we analyse them
objectively, precisely and systematically. Words have fixed meanings and to convey a
clear message the only thing we need to do is to speak objectively. Being objective is
thus a ‘good thing’; being subjective is a ‘bad thing.’ Reality can be analysed, measured
and catalogued. What you need is some mathematical principles, a compass, scales, a
square, a rule, maybe a microscope, some charts and a good dose of objective, unbiased
observation skills and the world will be revealed to you. Considering the astonishing
progress of the sciences and technology in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
(Outram, 1995: 48-62) we can well understand the modern confidence in the power of
science and rational thought to shed light on the ‘darkness’ of religious beliefs and
subjective judgement.

The myth of objectivism has still multiple manifestations in our educational practices.
We just need to turn our own observation skills towards most of our assessment and
evaluation models where ‘standards’ and ‘competencies’ are still the criteria for
determining success and ‘good practices’. Such views of the issue have been slowly
changing along the years, from the rationalist quest for a ‘scientific’, reliable, ‘standard’
way of ‘measuring’ performance to (Perren, 1967: 99-106; Whiteson, 1981: 345-52) to
a greater focus on teaching instead of testing (Promodrou, 1995: 13-25) and a
postmodern awareness of the socio, economic and political dimensions of testing (Hall,
2009). Nonetheless, the whole idea that someone’s knowledge can be assessed and
marked against a pre-determined scale of competence that is objectively pre-established
independently of the context where the examination is being applied, regardless of the
individuals being assessed or the circumstances where the exam takes place, is a tribute
to rationalist and empiricist philosophies. Moreover, quantitative data analysis in
educational research emanates ‘in part from positivism’ and relies on numerical
analysis, scales of data, descriptive and inferential statistics, tests and dependent and
independent variables to investigate a given phenomenon (Cohen et al, 2007: 501-6).
The supervisory (Freeman, 1982: 2), the ritualistic (Maingay, 1988: 118-20), and the
narrowly focused, product oriented (Rees, 1997: 90-1) approaches to classroom
observation, especially in the ITE practicum, are also influenced by rationalistic and
empiricist views.

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3.3 Romantic imagination and the humanistic approaches

If rationalism and empiricism contributed to the myth of Objectivism, Romanticism,

with its focus on feelings, emotions, meditation and reflective introspective thought, and
having the individual as the centre of the creative process, gave birth to the counter
myth of Subjectivism. According to Lakoff and Johnson (2003: 188-9), the myth of
Subjectivism says that in dealing with the realities of our daily lives, we ‘rely on our
senses’ and ‘intuitions’ , that ‘the most important things in our lives are our feelings,
aesthetic sensibilities, moral practices and spiritual awareness’, and that ‘objective can
be dangerous’ because it ignores individuality. The humanistic approach to education
(Moskowitz, 1994; Stevick, 1993) brings us echoes of Romantic imagination with its
emphasis on subjectivism and the pre-eminence of the individual. Humanistic views
were brought into ELT (Cornom, 1986; Arnold, 1998; Underhill, 1989) and led to the
‘teacher development as self-understanding’ view of teacher education (Hargraves and
Fullan, 1992: 7-13). The concern for the individual as the prime source of knowledge is
manifest in the use of teachers’ personal narratives in teachers’ professional
development (Bolton, 2005: 166; Wright and Bolitho, 2007: 64-71; Lee, 2007: 321-9).
The idea that trainee teachers’ perceptions, thoughts and feelings are the central
components of their professional beliefs and practice is a concept borrowed from the
Romantic constructive and confident understanding of imagination and, if sensibly
used, it can help to give imagination a very positive and productive role in teacher
education.

3.4 Postmodern imagination and new trends in teacher education

Pessimistic and nihilistic as they definitely are, postmodern notions of identity,

language and power have contributed enormously to our understanding of imagination
and have also generated critical ways of looking at English language teaching and
learning which are strongly influenced by postcolonial approaches and deconstructivism
(Pennycook, 1999: online; Canagarajah, 1999: 207-13; Holliday, 2008: 119-30).
Postmodern philosophy’s many deaths have given birth to critical pedagogies (Freire,
2000; Kanpol, 1999), critical literacy (Lankshear and McLaren, 1993; Morgan, 1993), a
social theory of learning (Lave and Wenger, 2005: 149-55; Wenger, 1998) and an

46
interpretive model of teaching (Rowland, 1998: 29-32). An example of a teacher
education practice informed by postmodern concepts of knowledge construction is use
of online forum communication in teacher education. Online courses for teachers
greatly depend on the collective contribution of participants and tutors to discussion
forums, hence, content is a partly generated by the participants themselves and the
‘knowledge’ made available and disseminated is the summary of such contributions
(Polin, 2004: 17-30; Green and Tanner, 2005: 312-21; Stapleton and Radia, 2009).
However, such approaches to ELT teacher education are still contested (Waters, 2007:
353-9) and far from being considered mainstream.

SUMMARY

We started this chapter by establishing some distinctions between the concepts of

imagination and creativity. We then analysed the nature of imagination from different
angles concerning the production of mental images and taking into account (a) the
presence or absence of the object or physical reality and (b) the level of consciousness
of the subject. Such initial considerations were followed by a story of imagination in
Western philosophy, from the epistemological and historical points of view, focusing on
its close connections with understandings of knowledge and identity. We have briefly
examined the pre-modern (Hebraic, Hellenistic and scholastic), modern (rationalist,
empiricist, romantic) and postmodern (deconstructivist) understandings of imagination
and concluded looking at how these philosophical ways of thinking are translated into
and inform some teacher education models and approaches.

In Chapter Three we will examine the interplay between imagination, knowledge and
professional reflection. I will then propose a view of teacher education that locates a
crucial central role to imagination in the development of ELT professionals and in the
process of implementing educational change.

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CHAPTER THREE

Teachers’ Imagination

My Streets are my, Ideas of Imagination.

Awake Albion, awake! and let us awake up together.
Jerusalem
Blake, W. (1964)

INTRODUCTION

When Claxton (1999) wrote about the multiple aspects of learning, he started with the
empiricist metaphor of the tool kit, but soon abandoned it in favour of the image of a
tree,
The metaphor of the toolkit is useful, and I shall make good use of it; but it
breaks down when we come to think about how these learning resources are
themselves acquired. …They grow out of each other, as the branches of a tree
grow out of the trunk. First comes the main stem of ‘brain learning’: picking up
patterns through immersion and experience. Out of that grow in turn the shoots
of imagination, intellect and intuition, and each shoot develops into a major
branch of the tree of learning (1999: 11-12)

Claxton’s metaphor is the fruit of a long cultural tradition that reserves a special place
for trees in our collective imagination. Wherever we choose to look at, we will realise
that trees are objects that live in the lands of our imagination in various forms. From the
biblical Tree of Good and Evil at the centre of the Garden of Eden, which gave Adam
and Eve the fruit of knowledge (Genesis, 1.2.15-17), to Tolkien’s (1999) Telperion and
Laurelin, the Silver and the Gold trees that brought light to the Land of the Valar in
ancient times, trees have always been associated with creation, knowledge and
imagination. The metaphor of the tree may help us to understand some aspects of
imagination in teacher education. It will help us in this chapter to look at the place and
role of imagination in three areas which are closely connected to it: (a) teachers’
knowledge, (b) professional reflection, and (c) change through education.

48
Fig. 4. The human thinking tree. (Based on Claxton, 1999: 11-12)

49
Fig. 5. The teacher education tree. (Based on Claxton, 1999: 11-12).

50
1. IMAGINATION AND KNOWLEDGE

In is telling indeed that Claxton (1999:11) has changed so quickly from the
compartmental tool kit to the complex and organic tree metaphor in his description of
different learning modes. Learning is the process by which knowledge is acquired,
shared and developed, and certainly the tool kit metaphor is too limited to describe it.
Perhaps we could say that, as its biblical counterpart, Claxton’s tree is at centre of the
teaching and learning garden, since one of the most frequent images teachers resort to
when asked to describe the classroom is the metaphor of the garden (Kliebard, 1975:
84-5). The garden metaphor, Breen’s coral gardens (2001: 128), Waters and Vilches’s
training island (2000: 127-8) and Claxton’s tree are all offshoots of the English
philosophy of aesthetics called organicism, whose major ‘categories are derived
metaphorically from the attributes of living and growing things’ (Abrams, 1953: 168).
And it was Coleridge who brought organicism into light. The contrast between the tool
kit and the tree is also the contrast between the ‘mechanical’ aspects of memory - which
is responsible for transposition, reflection, juxtaposition - and the combining power of
imagination, which is responsible for blending, recreation and synthesis (Coleridge,
1985). As Abrams (1953) puts it,

If Plato’s dialectic is a wilderness of mirrors, Coleridge’s is a very jungle of

vegetation…Authors, characters, poetic genres, poetic passages, words, meter,
logic become seeds, trees, flowers, blossoms, fruit, bark and sap. (1953:169)

Rationalist philosophy, as we have seen in the discussion of modern imagination, takes

a diametrically opposite view and makes an eulogy of science and technology as the
way to ‘purge mankind of residues of religion, mysticism and metaphysics’, since it
holds the conviction that empirical science was not just a form of knowledge, but the
only form of knowledge in the world (Schön, 1983: 32). In teacher education this way
of thinking is reflected in the idea that the knowledge teachers need to have is
knowledge of professional behaviour – methodology and pedagogy - and knowledge of
their subject matter - in our case, language proficiency and knowledge about language
and the ultimate goal for teacher learning is to produce technicians (Malderez and
Wedell, 2007: 13-14). If we follow this line of thought, the only knowledge that is
worth having is epistemic knowledge, i.e., general theoretical principles that apply to
different circumstances and problems. Epistemic knowledge is generated by

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theoreticians and academics and transmitted to teachers through professional reading
and by ‘expert’ teacher trainers. On the other hand, phronesis, or practical knowledge,
which comes from teachers’ own experience and which is contextualised and derived
through understanding of specific situations and cases (Loughran, 2006: 8-9), is either
relegated to a subordinate inferior position or completely disregarded. Epistemic
knowledge and phronesis are respectively at the tip and bulk of the ‘teacher iceberg’
(Malderez and Bodoczky 1999: 15). Epistemic knowledge is transmitted and
juxtaposed; phronesis is developed and synthesised. However, it would be simplistic to
think that these two different forms of knowledge exist independently of each other. To
conceive that would be to fall into the empiricist trap that sees things in separate
compartments.

Practical knowledge is influenced by the theories we come into contact with, i.e.,
experience is ‘theory-dependent’ because we not only select input, but also
interpretations of input (Bruner, 1986: 109-10). By the same token we could say that
theory is ‘experience-dependent’, since theoreticians and academics are also real people
who live in a real place and time and, thus, have their theories influenced by their
personal experiences. Indeed, the question of the knowledge base is so central to a
principled discussion of teacher education that different authors have tried to
systematise the issue in different ways. Burns and Richards (2009:3) contrast knowledge
about, which is the content knowledge of the ‘established core curriculum’ of ITE
programmes, and knowledge how, which encompasses the beliefs, practical knowledge
and personal theories that ‘underline teacher’s practical actions.’ Korthagen (1993: 319)
believes that non-rational, right-hemisphere information processing plays a ‘central role
in the everyday teaching’ and, thus, in the holistic construction of what teachers know
(Szestay, 2004: 129). Rogers (2002: 119), states that ‘much of our learning is accidental
and unintended’; and Boud et al (1993: 13) agree that learning, or the development of
knowledge, results of the complex interaction between our ‘feelings and motions
(affective), the intellectual and cerebral (cognitive) and action (conative)’ domains.

If these concepts are valid for teaching in general, they could also be useful to teacher
education and consequently our training practices should provide our trainee teachers
with opportunities to synthesise the theoretical, cognitive, left-hemisphere knowledge
about brought to them by professional literature and teacher educators’ input with their

52
own experiential, affective, right-hemisphere knowledge how. The human power
capable of making such a synthesis is imagination. Imagination can do such a synthesis
because our minds have two modus operandi, the paradigmatic mode and the narrative
mode (Bruner, 1986: 11-13), which provide distinctive ways of experiencing the world
and constructing reality. They are not reducible to each other, but complementary. Most
importantly, we need imagination to activate both of them. According to Bruner (1986),

The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode [scientific imagination]

leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof…it is the ability to see possible
formal connections before one is able to prove them in any formal way. …The
imaginative application of the narrative mode [humanistic imagination] leads
instead to good stories, gripping dramas…it strives to put its timeless miracles
into the particulars of experience, and to locate experience in time and place.
(1986: 13)

Both scientific and humanistic imaginations are ultimately expressed by individuals’

acts, but it does not mean that we should see them as the sole products of entirely
subjective individuality. Postmodern theories have shown us that individuals are
affected by the socio-cultural and historical contexts where they live and by the texts
they interact with (Alcoff, 2006:71). Postmodern imagination is based on the view that
what we are is the result of what we experience as a society and that our identities are
the product of our relationships with others. Hence, both the paradigmatic and the
narrative imaginations depend on the social construction of knowledge (Wenger, 1998:
3-15; Lave and Wenger, 2005: 143-50; Diamond, 1991: 13-15), on experiential and
vicarious learning (Jarvis et al, 2006: 53-67). They also depend on a theory of practice
(Mercer, 1995: 64-85; Boud et al, 1993: 8-16, Marland, 1997: 3-13) and on an
understanding of language which sees it as a way of organising different levels of
experience (Bruner 1986: 121-33; Bakhtin and Holquist, 1982: xix-xx). It is because of
these complex networks of influences that Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 7) contest the
metaphor of the tree and substitute it with the metaphor of the rhizomes which develop
by ‘subtle, transverse networks in unseen, subterranean ways’ and spread ‘linking one
node to another.’ According to Pope (2005),

The notion of rhizomatic growth is prefigured in the psychology of learning by

Vygotsky (1934) concept of ‘zone of proximal development’. This too entails
development from ‘the known’ to ‘the unknown’ by the most readily accessible
but not necessarily linear route. (2005: 16-17)

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Interesting and illustrative as the idea of the rhizomes is, it leads us, though, to the
predicament of postmodern ‘parodic imagination’ (Kearney, 1988: 251-5), a nihilistic
crisis of identity and the death of man (Foucault, 2001), which is also the death of
imagination. We may decide to look at the tree as a monolithic, hierarchically
constructed vertical axis, standing alone detached from others or we may chose to look
at the tree as the organising principle of subjectivity: the trunk that is the visible,
standing, unifying part of an organism that has as its basis deep, interweaving,
interconnecting roots that extract their nutrients from the same soil and water that feed
other similar but unique tress in the woodland of our existence. Personally, I choose the
latter. I choose to see the tree as the metaphor for the ‘experientialist synthesis’ that
brings together imaginative understanding and creative rationality (Lakoff and Johnson,
2003:192-4; Vygotsky, 1988: 39). In this metaphorical construction, teacher education
is a tree whose hopelessly entangled roots are the theoretical foundations of professional
education, notions of professional competence and capability (Day, 1999: 53-8),
cognitive intellectual engagement, empirical experimentation, learning experiences,
individual schemata, personal judgments, interaction with others and language (Figures.
4 and 5. As the biblical mythical tree, knowledge is the fruit of our teacher education
tree.

2. IMAGINATION AND REFLECTION

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;

The Lady of Shalott

Tennyson, A.L. (2005)

Since Schön’s (1983) discussion of the role of reflection in professional development

much ink has been spilled over reflection in teacher education. Actually, Schön does not
write having teachers particularly in mind. What he does say is that reflective teachers

54
need a sort of ‘educational technology’ that allows them to go beyond the capacity to
‘administrate drill and practice’ and which enables them to help students to ‘explore
new directions of understanding and action’ (Schön, 1983: 333-4). Boud et al (1985: 18-
37) propose a model of reflection that takes the learner’s behaviour, ideas, feelings and
intent as starting points for the reflective process, which consists of returning to the
experience, attending to feelings connect to it and re-evaluating the experience. The
outcome of such a process is the acquisition of new perspectives on experience, change
in behaviour, readiness for application and commitment to action. For Brookfield
(1995) reflection also has a critical function for it makes us question ‘hegemonic
assumptions,’ ie.,

ideas, structures, and actions [that] come to be seen by the majority of people as
wholly natural, preordained, and working for their own good, when in fact they
are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the
status quo that serves those interests. (1995: 15)

For him critical reflection is ‘inherently ideological’ since it is directed toward the self
but ‘springs from a concern to create the conditions under which people can learn to
love one another’ (Brookfield, 1995: 26). His formulation is an attempt to avoid the
perceived danger of excessive focus on the self, of an introspective practice that
excludes the other or any possibility of sharing meaningful ideas and feelings. That is
why for Claxton (1999: 191) ‘being reflective means looking inward as well as out.’
Nonetheless, reflection is a word that is closely associated with the image of a mirror,
since that is what mirrors do: they reflect images of the self and of the others. They
show us ‘shadows’ of the river, the village, ‘the red cloaks of market girls’, and of
ourselves. They are just visions of Camelot (Tennyson, 2005: 984-8). For Bolton
(2005),

The mirror image model of reflection suggests that there is a me out there
practising in the big world, and a reflected me in here in my head thinking about
it…This model is located in modernist duality: this in dialogue with that, in and
out, or here and there. (Emphasis on the original) (2005: 4)

Indeed, reflective practices in teacher education, such as the use of portfolios and
teachers’ journals, seem to be largely based on a modernist analytical approach to
knowledge and imagination. Even when feelings, behaviours and ideas are taken into

55
consideration in the process of reflection, usually the procedure is to dissect and
examine them under the microscope of logical thinking in order to catalogue them,
determine their origins and establish the best course of action to transform them in a
useful product. To break the curse of dualism we have to be able to look directly both at
the mirror and at the window and realise that they are different and complementary
ways of looking at the world. We should strive for a balance between reason and
intuition, deliberation and contemplation (Claxton, 1997: 85-99). Only imagination can
do that.

For Hume imagination is the uniting principle that connects the three features that our
ideas possess: ‘resemblance, continuity in time and space, and casual connexion’
(Warnock, 1976: 17). Resemblance is what allows us to recognise common
characteristics in objects, people, and situations even when they are not the same. It is
what makes possible find common trends in different teaching training situations and
different groups of trainees, for example. Resemblance connects us to the past.
Continuity in time and space is what allow me to believe that this study will still be here
even when I am not looking at it. It makes me believe that it still exists in time and
space even when I go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and that it will remain where
it is and will still be here after time elapses and I come back. Continuity in time and
space make us conceive the present. Casual connexion is what allows me to think that if
I keep writing, I will eventually finish the text and be able to complete my course.
Casual connexion projects us to the future.

The job of imagination is to connect the three of them. Boud et al’s (1985: 18-39) model
of reflection can only be operative if we bring imagination into the equation. Returning
to experience implies recollecting events and replaying them in your mind, seeing them
again with your ‘inward eye’. Attending to feelings and removing negative feelings
requires the ability to imagine alternative reactions and alternative imaginary scenarios.
None of these things is possible without imagination. Re-evaluating experience depends
on the association between ideas and feelings, integration between the observable and
the unobservable, a rehearsal of possibilities in order to validate new ideas before being
able to really observe them in the real world, and appropriation that is the capacity to
make new knowledge yours and, therefore, be able to modify it. None of these things is
possible without the work of imagination, for it permeates the whole process.

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3. IMAGINATION AND CHANGE

Trees are growing things. They start their lives as humble small seeds and change to be
the imposing full-size beings that give us shelter, shadow, oxygen and fantasy. Trees are
changing things and to understand change we have to look again at our teacher
education tree (Fig 4). Here I will depart from Claxton (1999: 11-12), who sees
imagination as one of the branches of the learning tree. I consider creativity as such a
branch, sprouting in the twigs of fantasy, visualisation, narrative, and so on. Imagination
is much more than just a branch of our tree. It is the vital sap that runs through it
carrying the nutrients and water from the roots to the leaves. Imagination is the life fluid
without which our tree would be ‘essentially fixed and dead’ (Coleridge, 1985: 304).
Without it, there is no change and there is no growth.

To understand how imagination can be so essential to the process of change in teacher

education we need a better understanding of how imagination operates in our minds.
For that we are going to rely heavily on Frye’s (1964) metaphor of the person
shipwrecked in a desert island. What Prospero, the main character in The Tempest,
(Shakespeare, 1988), Ralph’s band in Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954) and Tom Hanks
in the film Cast Away (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162222/) all have in common is
that they, in different ways, try to change the inhospitable reality of the environment
where they find themselves into something else. Apparently Chuck, Hanks’ character,
does not interfere much in the environment, but certainly he is the one who becomes
closer to God for he is the only one who creates another being to make himself
company and transforms the inert material of a volleyball into his companion, Wilson.
What these narratives tell us is the story of the human mind using imagination to
construct alternative models of human experience. According to Frye (1964: 16-23), the
mind operates at three levels, each with a particular way of interacting with the world
and with a different language for each one of them,

(a) the level of consciousness, where the ‘most important thing is the difference
between me and everything else.’ This is what makes the person in the desert
island able to distinguish between himself and the beasts in the jungle. You
realise that the world around you has no human shape and it apart from yourself.

57
 At this level, the language is the one of internal monologue, of self-expression
and of ordinary everyday conversation.
(b) the level of social participation, where the individual establishes a link between
nature and himself. You look around and you develop feelings towards the
world, either finding it beautiful of threatening. Coleridge believed that only
love and fear have the power to make us see objects beyond themselves
(Warnock, 1976: 81-2). Moreover, your curiosity and intellect make you want to
find out more about the world out there: investigate, examine, and study it. Here
the language is the one of science and technology.
(c) the level of imagination, where having examined the world you think that it
could be different. Perhaps there is something missing or something that could
be better than it is, or more beautiful. You imagine possible changes and
alternative ways to see and relate to the world around you. The language now is
the one with produces poems, plays and novels.

Once again these levels are neither apart from each other nor proceed in a linear way.
They are in constant dialogue with each other. According to Frye (1964),

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to
explain its laws. From there, it moves toward imagination: it becomes a mental
construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it
goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics,
which is one of the languages of imagination, along with literature and music.
(1964: 23)

Imagination is what makes Prospero change the island of his exile and political
ostracism into the place and society where he rules supreme. Moreover, imagination is
what may have made Shakespeare change the report of a Virginia Company of London
shipwreck (Nostbakken, 2004: 27-8) into a beautiful, intriguing, controversial and
exciting play. There is no change without imagination, and this includes educational
change. Jarvis et al (2006: 13) remind us that ‘changes in education systems do not take
place in a social vacuum.’ First of all, changes in education happen because, as we have
seen in Chapter Two, any development in human conceptual systems forms waves of
influence in all other areas of human activity, be it politics, the economy, or personal
relationships. It is like the ripples on the surface of a lake where you threw a pebble
(Wright and Bolitho, 2007: 27). Education is not immune to this. Changes in society

58
inevitably lead to changes in education and consequently also in teacher education.
However, not all changes are the same and Fullan (1991; 29) categorises them into two
types: (a) first order changes, which ‘improve the efficiency or effectiveness of what is
currently done without disturbing the basic organisational features’ of a system; and (b)
second order changes, which ‘seek to alter the fundamental ways in which
organisations are put together.’ For instance, educational institutions may decide that
instead of basing their CPD programme on short summer courses for teachers, they will
instead adopt an institution-based skills development model with regular sessions
during the term between the teachers and the mentor/supervisor. This is in the first order
category of change. In order to lead to a second order type of change, not only do the
location and the time of the sessions have to change, but also more fundamental and
related issues, such as the teaching model adopted by the trainer, the power relationship
between trainer and trainees and the level of agency trainees have over the programme
and the outcomes. An obvious example of first order change alone is when the
education authorities pour millions of pounds into fitting classrooms with new
technological gadgets, such as interactive whiteboards, or printing new curriculum
materials without discussing such ‘innovations’ with teachers or piloting them in
schools (Hoban, 2002:14-16). Such situations are the products of a mechanistic,
modernist view that believes that the world can be changed and knowledge forged
efficiently as long as you use the right tools to shape it.

The sort of change we are concerned with here, however, is the second order category
that depends on imagination to bring about more in-depth changes: from didactic and
exploratory models to an interpretive model (Rowland, 1998: 19-32), and from
transmission to more humanistic, creative and critical approaches to ELT teacher
education. Certainly, it is much easier to achieve superficial changes than in-depth ones,
because these depend on changes in long-established habits, deeply rooted beliefs, self-
image and world schemata (Cook, 1994: 9-19). Moreover, alterations at such levels
‘may be painful’, provoke ‘anxiety, uncertainty and a sense of loss’ causing individuals
to have their new positions challenged by others, their personal and professional
relationships disrupted and their self-confidence undermined (Nias, 1987:137-9). As
Fullan (1991: 32) puts it, ‘real change, then, whether desired or not, represents a serious
personal and collective experience characterized by ambivalence and uncertainty.’
Change always results in a conflict between the past experiences, perceptions and

59
beliefs, the present state of affairs of what we want or are requested to change, and the
future changes that we want to see implemented. Once again, we depend on imagination
and its combining power of resemblance, time-space continuity and connexion to help
us to achieve what Brown (2000) calls cultural continuity. Hayes (2000: 135-44), Lamb
(1995: 72-9) and Kouraogo (1987: 171-8) tell us stories of attempts to introduce
changes in ELT teacher education in different countries around the world where success
and failure were present at different levels. What they all had in common is the fact that
they are narratives of conflict and resistance to change. Cultural continuity can help to
implement changes, because, even being a natural part of life, changes ‘may be easier to
accept if they emerge from current practice’ (Brown, 2000: 227-30). Cultural continuity
is the equivalent of bringing together Plato and the Romantics to the negotiation table to
discuss the place of imagination in society. Adopting the notion of cultural continuity
in teacher education means to work at the same time with Platonic tradition and
Romantic innovation, trying to use the synthetic powers of teachers’ imagination to
bring about change in ELT teacher education contexts. According to Abbs (1996),

Traditional culture is concerned with fidelity to the community and to the

received traditions which make community possible. Innovative culture is
concerned with fidelity to individual experience, that which is known, sensed,
felt, apprehended from within. There must often be war between these two
cultures, and, if a living balance is to be sustained, neither side must win. (Abbs,
1996: 41)

Teacher educators, working either inside there own institutions or travelling around the
world teaching as guest professors and international speakers in TAs conferences, need
an understanding of the importance of synthesising tradition and innovation in the
processes of adopting an interpretive model and imaginative and critical approaches to
ELT and bringing change in teachers’ professional conceptualisations and practices. We
need the power of our own imaginations to transform the environment of the teacher
education islands (Walters and Vilches, 2000: 127-8) where we find ourselves. Only
activating our imagination will we be able to recognise the differences between our own
understanding and that of our trainee teachers, feel curious enough to establish a link
with them, and help them to imagine alternative ways and possible changes in the
teaching and learning contexts where they live.

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SUMMARY

In this chapter we used the metaphor of the tree to help us understand the living,
organic, flexible nature of ELT teacher education and the fundamental role imagination
plays in helping it to grow and bloom. First, we examined the strong connections
between imagination and the nature of teachers’ knowledge and its intrinsic connection
with notions of social construction of knowledge and experiential learning. Secondly,
we looked at the idea of reflection in professional contexts and how imagination is a
fundamental component of reflective practice for teachers. Last, but not least, we
proposed imagination as the ingredient without which no change from didactic to
imaginative and critical teacher education models can be possible for, paraphrasing Frye
(1964: 140), it is the job of imagination to produce out of the EFL education models we
have, a vision of the ELT education models we want to have.

In Chapter Four we examine how working with metaphors and narratives can help
trainee teachers to use imagination to develop their personal and professional
knowledge, become more reflective teachers and engage in the process of bringing
innovation and change to ELT.

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CHAPTER FOUR
Exercising Imagination

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;
As You Like It
Shakespeare W. (1988)

INTRODUCTION

In teacher education, the whole discussion about imagination becomes relevant only if
we see it under the light of the personal and professional development that happens in
teachers’ lives and which takes place in the context where they work. My argument in
this study is that imagination has a crucial role to play in promoting cultural continuity
and innovation. It is also instrumental in bringing together different sorts of knowledge
into an organic meaningful whole. What we need in teacher education is a way of
thinking that helps teachers and teacher trainers to explore the possibilities their
imaginations open to them in the processes of constructing knowledge, initiating and
managing change and developing as professionals. For my part, I cannot think of a
stronger or more solid argument for the centrality of imagination in teacher education.
The question that remains is how to achieve this.

Some activities and tasks may help us to activate and exercise teachers’ imagination.
Although there are plenty of imaginative material that could be explored here, such as
visual and dramatic arts, virtual worlds, language play and humour, the limits of this
study do not permit a more exhaustive treatment and, therefore, I have decided to
concentrate on the two manifestations of imagination that have the potential to generate
others: metaphors and narratives. Metaphors can be created either in language or in
visual forms such as painting, drawing, and photography (Appendix C). Narratives may
generate roleplay, drama and films (Appendices D to F). In this chapter we will
investigate how metaphors and narratives can provide opportunities to explore teachers’
imagination as well as the reasons for including them in our programmes and the
benefits they can bring to ELT teacher education.

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1. INITIAL THOUGHTS

An initial consideration is necessary here: the idea of working with metaphors and
narratives in teacher education proposed in this chapter fundamentally differs from the
objectives advanced by most resource materials available in the ELT publishing market,
as we saw in Chapter One. It does not propose the use of creative tasks in order to give
trainee teachers practice in adopting and managing the same sort of activities in their
own lessons. It does not propose the use of creative tasks in order to convince teachers
that imagination is important for their learners. These should be natural and optional by-
products of engaging with imagination in teacher education. The main reason for
adopting an imaginative approach to teacher education is to help teachers to use the
combining power of their own imaginations to make the necessary connections between
the different areas of teaching knowledge, to visualise a big picture of the of ELT
education.

Furthermore, exercising imagination cannot be something imposed by teacher trainers,

nor can participants be persuaded to be imaginative and creative. What teacher trainers
can do is to create opportunities, provide stimulus, give support and guide participants
in the exploration of their imaginative constructs. What teacher trainers can do is to use
some imaginative strategies themselves to create an environment that helps imagination
to bloom in their teacher training contexts.

Perhaps more importantly than everything else, however, is to start by discussing with
participants the role and place of imagination in their own personal and professional
development. Introducing and examining with student teachers and teachers in CPD
programmes the philosophical and historical understandings of imagination and
knowledge is fundamental to help participants to: (a) identify where some concepts that
degrade the role of imagination and personal experiential learning in education come
from, (b) see how imagination is deeply connected to notions of knowledge, power and
change, and (c) decide where imagination can lead them to in the process of becoming
English language educators themselves.

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2. METAPHORS

Using a metaphor to describe life as the theatre, as Shakespeare (1988; II.vii.139-67)

does in As You Like It, is not the prerogative of poetic geniuses. The genius of
Shakespeare is in putting a highly elaborated extended metaphor in the mouth of
Jacques. For Jacques is one of his jesters, a common folk stock character, who speaks
‘the real language of man’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 2005: 287) and who, most
naturally, resorts to metaphor, as we all do in our very ordinary uses of language.
Contrary to popular belief, metaphor is not only a poetic device, but a major principle in
the way our conceptual systems are structured. According to Lakoff and Johnson
(2003),

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how
we relate to other people…our conceptual system is largely metaphorical…the
way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a
matter of metaphor (2003: 3)

When Breen (2001: 128) says that the language classroom is a coral garden, he is using
a metaphor - i.e., he is using a language device that allow us to express and experience
one concept in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003: 5) - making it possible for
us to visualise and understand the classroom from a different perspective (Owen, 2001:
xv). For instance, if the language classroom is a coral garden, it means that it is a
beautiful, colourful and rich environment, but it also means that it is fragile, mysterious,
sometimes dangerous and subject to the moods of the weather and ocean currents. It
may also convey the idea that it is inhabited by exotic species of algae and fish of which
we usually have very little knowledge. Are these species of exotic fish, our students?
Are teachers the expert divers that go to the coral gardens to take photos of it and collect
some samples? We cannot be sure if such connections and questions crossed Breen’s
mind when he used this metaphor for the classroom. What we can be sure about,
though, is the immense potential for reflection and critical awareness that metaphors
offer us. According to Bruner (1979),

Metaphor joins dissimilar experiences by finding the image or the symbol that
unites them at some deeper emotional level of meaning. Its effects depends upon
its capacity for getting past the literal mode of connecting (1979: 63)

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To understand the power of metaphor to create these connections and also why it is still
so rarely used or even ignored in teacher education programmes we have to look at
some philosophical understandings of language. The medium of education is language
and language ‘imposes a perspective in which things are viewed and a stance toward
what we view’ (Bruner, 1986: 121). Pre-modern imagination systems, from the Hebraic
tradition to Neo-Platonism and occultism, believed that there was an imputed direct
correspondence between the word and the symbol and the reality they represented
(Tambiah, 1996: 34). In Saussure’s terms, there was no gap between the signifier
(word/symbol) and the signified (object) (Joseph, 2004: 59-75). Hence, pronouncing the
name of God in vain was a sin against the Deity Himself (Exodus: 2.20.7), for there is
no difference between Word and Being. This is also the rationale for the existence of
‘magical words’, since the signifier, when uttered, could activate the signified. Thus,
saying ‘Lumus’ in Harry Potter’s stories is the equivalent to produce light (Rowling,
1997). Therefore, allowing human imagination to use language to create
correspondences and manipulate the relations between ‘the domains of the divine’ and
the human world is nothing short of heresy (Tambiah, 1996:36-7). There is no place for
mystic and fancy words either in the scholastically controlled discourse of pre-modern
education, or in the scientifically oriented discourse of the Enlightenment. Metaphor in
theses conceptual frameworks is either sin or folly. We still carry with us such
philosophical inheritance when we treat metaphor in teacher education as either
potentially disruptive discourse that may call into question official sanctioned
methodologies and approaches, or as a complete waste of ‘training time.’

Only exploring the conceptual metaphors that are present in our everyday lives can we
reveal the ‘fundamental values of our culture’ (Lakoff and Johnson: 2003: 14-22) and
acquire a greater awareness of the reasons and roots of our beliefs and attitudes towards
to world, the others and ourselves. However, with time and use conceptual metaphors
may lose their power and become conventional to the point that we do not see where
they come from anymore. According to Ellis (2001),

conventional metaphors do more than construct particular realities, they also

channel and constrain thought…we lose the sight of the metaphorical origins of
our theories and treat them as literal statements about reality. (2001:67)

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An example of conventional metaphor may be when teachers describe themselves as
‘coaches’. The sports metaphor may mean that teachers are focussing on the collective
aspect of classroom interaction and the idea of working together to achieve a common
objective, but it also implies that learning English is a competition to be either won or
lost. Different interpretations of a conventional metaphor alert us to the fact that people
frame images in different ways. Certainly, repeated exposure to a metaphor affects the
way people conceptualise things, however

this does not mean that people are enslaved by their metaphors or that the choice
of metaphor is a matter of taste or indoctrination. Metaphors are
generalisations…Different metaphors can frame the same situation for the same
reason that different words can describe the same object (Pinker, 2007:261)

Working with metaphors in teacher education, thus, has multiple functions. It helps us
to create images that represent the way we see things, clarify the nature of our
constructed images, and reframe our existing metaphors in alternative ways by
comparing and contrasting them with other possible images for the same concept
(Appendix C).

Creating metaphors demands the engagement of the imagination, for only imagination
can allow us to visualise one thing in terms of another and make us conceive the idea of
the classroom as a factory, a stage production, a mountain pass, an African village hut, a
golf course or a kite. Indeed, these were some of the metaphors that members of our
MEd group created and which were properly illustrated and discussed with our tutor.
Explaining our metaphors to the group and being requested to extend them was part of
the process of discovering the structure that informs some of our conceptual system of
teacher education. Korthagen (1993: 322) narrates the story of a novice teacher who had
been having discipline problems with her class and whose metaphor for the teacher was
a ‘lion-tamer’. The teacher and her supervisor then explored the lion-tamer metaphor to
determine the origins and the implications of such a view of the classroom as a lions’
cage. Exploring metaphors in teacher education can help teachers to elucidate the nature
of the constructs which they work by (Thornbury, 1991: 193-200), to ‘organise their
belief sets’ and ‘aid to reflection-on-practice’ (Ellis, 2001: 67-8).

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What I propose in this study is to give metaphor an active role in our teacher education
programmes, short courses and even workshops by,

a. exploring our own conceptual metaphors,

b. questioning the conventional metaphors of everyday discourse,
c. creating new metaphors for different aspects of teaching and learning,
d. discussing our metaphors with our peers, tutors and even students,
e. comparing and contrasting our metaphors with others created by other people.

Because metaphors can help us to ‘disclose’ concepts and feelings that we are
‘censoring’ and that are deeply ‘ingrained’ in our ways of behaving (Wright and
Bolitho, 2007: 71), proposing tasks and activities that require participants to imagine
and explore metaphors should be a regular feature of teacher education if we aim at
developing reflective professionals who are committed to educational change. However,
it is also because metaphors can be such powerful instruments of disclosure that may
disturb ‘our comfortable sense of self and identity’ (Owen, 2001: xvi), that teacher
trainers have to use them responsibly, showing respect for participants’ individuality.

3. NARRATIVES

Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so in fact, for while
food make us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what
make our condition human.
Kearney, R. (2002)

Kearney (2002: 3) makes a comprehensive analysis of the role of stories in human

history and in the construction of self. For him it is the transition ‘from nature to
narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated’ that transformed us from a
merely ‘biological life’ to a ‘truly human one.’ From the biblical narrative to the Greek
myths and stories of the gods, from the bard’s tales of the Mabinogion (Guest, 1997) in
the Celtic tradition to the popular gothic novels in the 18th century, to the over 24
million fiction books sold by publishers each year in the UK alone
(http://www.publishers.org.uk), narratives have been an integral part of our lives.

67
However, we have seen that since modern times Western philosophical thought have
‘excluded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire’ (Bolton, 2005: 14).
Rhetoric has excluded fiction. Narrative and metaphor with their sisters, intuition and
imagination, were relegated to the obscure corners of learning and dismissed as an
inferior, usually female, untrustworthy form of knowledge (Lloyd, 1996: 149-64).
These are the deep roots of teacher education practices that take into account only
‘legitimate’ knowledge that is generated by analytical thinking and, mainly, quantitative
research; whereas teachers’ personal and professional stories, literature and qualitative
oriented research are seen as mere second-class contributors in the process of
professional development.

Leví-Strauss has showed us that our stories are offspring of some basic universal myths
(Leví-Strauss, 1978: 11-15) and myth is, according to Bruner (1979:31-2), ‘an aesthetic
device for bringing the imaginary’ into collaboration with the objective ‘facts of life.’
Myth and stories thus, have the functions of (a) creating a common basis for
communicating and sharing feelings and experience; (b) containing and fashioning our
internal impulses allowing us to live in society, and (c) filtering our experiences.
Eagleton (1983:185) further sees narratives as a ‘source of consolation’ for they offer
structured fictive comfort to our problems and a ‘closure to our desires’. Stories reveal
the internal and external dialogic nature of our relationships since ‘every plot event is a
moment of encounter with the other’ and also with ourselves (Hall, 1995: 261).

3.1 Teachers’ narratives

‘Teachers tell stories.’ Golombek (2009: 155) states that stories are ‘expressions of a
dynamic and complex kind of knowledge – teachers’ practical knowledge.’ She gives
examples of how, when asked to define teaching-learning concepts, teachers switch into
narrative mode and tell stories about their students and classroom events. Much has
been written about the value of teachers’ narratives, journals and portfolios in teacher
education (Lee, 2007: 321-9; Shin, 2003: 3-10; Tanner et al, 2000: 20-30; Banfi, 2003:
34-42) in the process of raising awareness of teachers’ beliefs and attitudes and to aid in
the process of reflection. However, the old positivist rift between imagination and
reality still persists even when we ask people to recollect experiences and events. Boud

68
et al (1985: 25-6) reckon as extremely useful in the process of reflection replaying ‘the
experience in the mind’s eye’ at the same time that urge us to ‘ensure that our reflection
is on the basis of the actual events as we experienced them at the time, rather in terms of
what we wished had happened.’ Such a stance presupposes that recollection, which is
nothing more than a form of narrative, can be strictly objective and unbiased. It
understands that the human mind is able to read experiences without being affected by
other events, emotions, hindsight gained since ‘the time’ things happened. Here we can
make good use of deconstruction theories that tell us that language and reality are
interwoven (Royle, 1998: 63-5). Every recollection/story is a construction, a dialogue
between the me-character and the me-narrator. Every narrative, biography, anecdote,
piece of teaching journal is, to a greater or lesser extent, a piece of fiction, 'For all
stories are true and yet not true’ (Owen (2001: xii). Moreover, what teachers ‘wanted it
to be’ can reveal as much about their concepts, beliefs and assumptions about teaching
as if the narrative were strictly realistic. All of them construct what we are. According
to Bolton (2005),

If our lives are not constantly told and retold, storying each experience, we
would have no coherent notion of who we are, where we are going, what we
believe, what we want, where we belong and how to be…my psychosocial
selfhood relies upon my grasp of my narratives of relationship, chronology and
place (2005: 106)

Therefore, personal narratives should not be only an exercise that teachers do once in a
while, but an integral part of their initial and continuing professional development
programmes. There are various techniques that can be used in teacher education to
achieve so, such as peer interviews, storytelling, biographies, traditional teacher
journals, portfolios and blogs (Appendix D). Each teacher trainer should be able to
negotiate with their groups what technique best fits the group. What is important is to
make this sort of writing a crucial component of teachers ITE and CPD programmes,
since ‘writing is fundamental to the achievements of abstract and reflective thinking’, it
enables teachers to reflect upon their meanings’ and become critically aware of their
own thought processes (Diamond, 1991: 13). Above all though, what is necessary is an
openness and honesty of mind to be able to reflect on the meaning of the stories we
narrate.

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3.2 Literature

Storytelling will never end for there will always be someone to say ‘Tell me a
story’, and somebody else who will respond ‘Once upon a time…’

Kearney, R. (2002)

Aristotle in Poetics wrote that the function of tragedy is to imitate action (Aristotle,
1996: 4-5) and in doing so creatively re-describe the world in a way that concealed
patterns and unexplored feelings can be revealed. Kearny (2002: 129-56), in an entire
chapter devoted to narrative, analyses what he considers the five ‘enduring functions of
storytelling’: plot or mythos, re-creation or mimesis, release or catharsis, wisdom or
phronesis and ethics or ethos. Each of these functions is performed by teachers’
biographies as well as fiction, and both forms of narrative have an important role to play
in teacher education.

Fictional narratives usually come to us in the form of novels, short stories, plays and
poems, which collectively we conventionally call literature. The multiple reasons for
using literature in ELT are inspired by different currents of thought in literary criticism
which range from liberal humanism to the various forms of criticism sprung from post-
structuralism (Barry, 1995) and inform different literature reading practices, from
traditional approaches to intercultural awareness and literary engagement (Hall, 2005:
47-127). The approaches we adopt to reading literature in ELT are coherent with both
theoretical principles that inform our understanding of the role of literature in language
teaching/learning and with our teaching objectives and beliefs (Lima, 2009: 17-19).
Much has also been written about the place and role of literature in language learning
(Widdowson, 1984: 149-162; Brumfit, 1986; McRae, 1991; Maley, 2009) but our main
concern in this study is the place of literature in teacher education.

The disclosure of perceptions, beliefs and feelings through teachers’ biographies and
narratives as ideal as it sounds is not something easy to attain. Exposure to the group,
self-awareness, a sense of self-inadequacy, the risk of being criticised and judged by
colleagues and by your tutors are all very concrete risks that many times participants are
not ready to take. Sometimes the stakes are just too high and disclosure, in certain
teacher education contexts, may lead to serious conflict, segregation and even trauma. I

70
have seen myself a teacher leave the training room in tears because her account of a
teaching episode was ‘critically deconstructed’ by the teacher trainer, who did not have
the sensitivity to realise that the participant was not interpreting this as an ‘intellectual
exploration of concepts’ but as a judgement of the person. What fictional, literary
accounts can do, if used mindfully, is to provide us with a ‘safe ground’ for the
exploration of teaching/learning concepts, beliefs and feelings without exposing
participants too much. If all stories have the mythical, mimetic, cathartic, phronetic and
ethical functions that Kearny tells us about, fictional narratives may be as useful for
triggering analysis and reflection as historical ones. Besides that, there is a limit to the
amount of experience a human being can have in a lifetime and ‘there are many
situations when we have to learn from secondary or mediated experience’ (Jarvis et al,
2003: 67). No person can have all the experience and knowledge in the world and we
need the fictionality of literature to complement our own limited experiences and views
of the world. As Bruner (1979) puts it,

No person is master of the whole culture…each man lives a fragment of it. To be

whole he must create his own version of the world, using that part of his cultural
heritage he has made his own through education. (1979: 116)

Furthermore, only literature can ‘absorb everything from natural or human life into its
own imaginative body’ (Frye: 1964: 71-2). Literature is the embodiment of the
combining power of imagination to bring into life people who inhabit places beyond the
spatial-temporal realm we live in, to give voice and feelings to objects and express
feelings and ideas that we can appropriate. According to Frye (1964),

Literature as a whole is…the range of articulated human imagination as it

extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depths of imaginative hell.
Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man (1964: 105)

Poetry and fictional narratives, such as novels, short stories and films, are powerful
tools teacher educators can use to bring to the surface teachers’ beliefs, conceptual
systems and perceptions of the teaching-learning process. For instance, films in which
the main characters are teachers (Appendix E) or novels where schools are part of the
plot can provide excellent material for discussion and disclosure (Appendix F). Short
stories and even graded readers, in case participants are non-native speaker trainee
teachers still improving their command of English, can also be a useful source of

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narratives. An adaptation of Prowse’s (2002) principles for extensive reading (Fig.6)
could be used by teacher trainers as some working principles when including narratives
in their teacher education programmes and also serve as material for discussion with
participants on the approach adopted to the exploration of fictional narratives in both
initial and continuing professional development programmes.

1. Choice All the research into extensive reading points towards 'free
voluntary reading'. Give participants a menu of story options
which are related to the issue you are interested in.

2. Ease Ease of reading does not preclude engagement and I would

prioritise books which make the reader keep turning the pages.

3. Texts to engage with When reading is easy and pleasurable people read more and the
and react to learning benefits grow with the amount read.

4. No comprehension The natural response to a book is emotional or intellectual, and

questions comprehension questions are neither of these.

5. Individual silent reading Reading at the participants' own pace while they turn the text into
a theatre in their mind is vastly preferable to reading aloud, or
'barking at print.'

6. No dictionaries Well-written literature contextualises, glosses and repeats any

lexical items. The use of a dictionary (essential for intensive
reading) prevents the reader from developing valuable guessing
skills.

7. Range of genres Make a wide range of genres available to the learner – the choice
of reading material is very personal. You may also include
different media versions of a story, such a as films, music and
drama.

8. Use recordings Reading and listening at the same time conveys great benefits in
improving sound-symbol correspondence and in increasing
reading speed.

9. No tests Testing gets in the way of reading. The true test of reading is
when a participant starts another book.

10. Teacher trainer The teacher trainer must read the same books as the participants
participation so as to be able to discuss the stories with them.

Fig. 6: Using literature in teacher education - some working principles. (Adapted from
Prowse, 2002: 142-4)

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Literature is always the fruit of imagination, whatever we consider it as divine
inspiration, human subjective creativity or a socio-historical construct. If we want to
engage the imagination of our trainee teachers and give them glimpses of different
possible worlds, literature should be part of our repertoire of activities and tasks in
teacher education.

SUMMARY

In this chapter I have argued that the use of metaphors and narratives has a broad and
important purpose in teacher education, i.e., the function of promoting reflection,
professional and personal development and facilitate educational change. Subsequently,
we analysed the roles of metaphors, biographies, teachers’ narratives and literature to
help us to achieve these objectives. Appendices C to F provide examples of metaphor
and narrative activities that can be used in both initial and continuing professional
development programmes.

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POSTSCRIPT

I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like
in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness
and danger they were.… Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant
something, even if you were too small to understand why.

Jackson, P. (2002)

Every story must have an ending, even if each ending means also the beginning of
something else. In this study we have started with a brief look at the status and state of
imagination in ELT publications, CPD programmes and ITE syllabus. We then
examined how imagination is understood in different philosophical traditions and how
these conceptualisations have influenced some of our ELT teacher education models
and practices. After that, we analysed the interplay between imagination, knowledge,
reflection and educational change. Finally, we looked at the role of metaphor and
narratives for engaging teachers’ imagination in teacher education. The question now
is, ‘What comes next? ‘

This study is like one of those stories which have an open ending. It is up to the reader
to decide how it ends: to imagine what happens to the characters and how a sequel
could be. It is up to teacher educators to decide whether imagination really matters and
will continue in teacher education or we will accept the postmodern announcement that
imagination has died with Man. This is a decision that each teacher educator has to
make by him/herself. What I can do in the conclusion of this study is just to share my
own decision and tell my readers where I stand.

And I stand with Kearney (1988) when he says that,

If the deconstruction of imagination admits no epistemological limits…it must

recognize ethical limits. Here an now in the face of the postmodern interminable
deferment and infinite regress, of floating signifiers and vanishing signifieds,
here and now I face an other who demands of me an ethical response. (1988:
361) (Emphasis in the original)

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I do not think we can go back to the comfort of believing in a metaphysical source of
imagination that has planned everything for us, or that we can be naïve enough to
believe in the power of Man to control our world. Nor there is a way to ignore the
postmodern view that we are social beings made up of multiple identities in a world that
many times makes little sense. What we can do with this ‘we shouldn’t be here, but we
are’ is to look at each others’ faces and recognise in the other what we all have in
common. When Kearney talks about an ethical response to the face of the other (1988:
361-8), we should think of the faces of our trainee teachers and our language learners
and tell them here we are. Imagination should be the principle that makes us see the
differences and similarities among us and lead us to an ethical, reflective and committed
response to them in an attempt to make, if not the world, which is too big a thing, at
least teacher education a better place than it is at the moment.

Imagination in teacher education is not only about telling stories and using songs,
paintings and films in language learning. It is not just about designing creative and
innovative activities and tasks. It is also about that, but not only. Imagination in teacher
education has a much important role. It is the ‘combining power’ that can bring
knowledge, reflection, and change. It is the magical spark of light that can transform
language instructors into educators.

… TO BE CONTINUED

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APPENDIX A – Major schools of thought and their influences on teacher education

Periods Major religious and Major thinkers & Major texts Influences on Teacher Education in
(circa) philosophical systems writers Past and Present Times

Biblical Times Hebraic Scholasticism Hebrew commentators The Old Testament Imagination and creativity are acceptable
(before 500 BC) Talmudic Texts as long as they generate behaviours,
materials and classroom procedures that
Ancient Platonism Plato The Republic ensure that the ‘true’ and ‘stable’ values of
Greece & Aristotelian philosophy Aristotle Poetics, the professional culture are preserved and
Rome De Anima passed on. Knowledge and methodologies
(500 BC–400) are transmitted to teachers and student
teachers by ELT ‘experts’, who are the
Medieval Church Scholasticism Augustine Confessions ‘gatekeepers’ to the profession. Teacher
Europe Neo-Platonism Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica education follows a didactic, monologic,
(500-1300’s) authoritarian and externally controlled
model.

Renaissance Aristotelian rationalism Martin Luther The Ninety-Five Thesis Spread of ‘scientific’ teaching methods and
(1400-1500’s) Reformation William Tyndale Translation of the Bible teacher training courses. Teaching is seen
in English as a science; classroom observation
Enlightenment Rationalism René Descartes Meditations on for supervision purposes; proliferation of
(1600’s) Philosophy research in education; focus on skills and
Empiricism John Locke An Essay Concerning competencies development; focus on
Human Understanding ‘objective’ forms of assessment and
David Hume A Treatise of Human evaluation of performance; examinations
Nature and certificates based on ‘international’
Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason language and competencies frameworks ;
teacher as a manager.

76
Georgian to Romanticism William Wordsworth ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Imagination promoted in EFL in the 1980-
Victorian Samuel Taylor Coleridge Ballads 90’s; proliferation of classroom materials
Times Biographia Literaria to use literature, songs and drama. In
(1700-1800’s) teacher education the focus is on the
development of teacher and student
teachers’ self-esteem and self-
understanding; focus on formative
assessment; humanistic and ‘holistic’,
constructivist approaches.

Present times Postmodernism Jean Paul Sartre
(1900-2000’s)
Deconstructivism Louis Pierre Althusser
Michel Foucault
Roland Barthes
Jacques Derrida
Mikhail Bahktin
Gilles Deleuze &
Félix Guattari
Imagination: A Learner-centred approaches in EFL, focus
Psychological Critique on learners’ autonomy; advent of English
Philosophy and the as a lingua franca. Focus on the
Spontaneous development of teachers and student
Philosophy of the teachers’ critical thinking and critical
Scientists. literacy skills; reflection and critical
The order of things: an analysis as main components of
archaeology of the professional development; end of the
human sciences. supremacy of the native-speaker;
Image-Music-Text contextualisation and teacher participation
in the development of syllabuses;
Of Grammatology ‘ecological’ approaches to teacher
The Dialogic education.
Imagination: Four
Essays
A Thousand Plateaus

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APPENDIX B - Literary references

Author(s) Title / Year 1 Further information and web links

Blake, W. Jerusalem Subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion, the last, longest, and greatest in scope of the prophetic
(1820) books written and illustrated by Blake. It tells the story of the fall of Albion, Blake's embodiment of man,
Britain, or the western world as a whole.
(http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=jerusalem&java=no)

Dickens, C. Hard Times Dickens’ tenth novel is a story that highlights the social and economic pressures of the times and the
(1854) divide between capitalistic mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.
(http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/charlesdickens/HardTimes/Chap1.html)

Guest, Charlotte The Mabinogion A collection of eleven prose Welsh stories collated from 13th century manuscripts with tales draw on
(ed) (1838-49) pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/mbng10h.htm)

Golding, W. Lord of the Flies An allegorical novel by Nobel Prize-winning William Golding which discusses how culture created by
(1954) man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern
themselves with disastrous results.(http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Lord+of+the+Flies)

Milton, J. Paradise Lost An epic poem in blank verse which narrates the Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of
(1667) Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
(http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/lost/lost.html)

78
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling which narrate the
and the adventures of the adolescent wizard and his friends in a struggle against evil.
Philosopher’s (http://www.bloomsbury.com/HarryPotter/)
Stone (1997)
Shakespeare, W. A Midsummer A comedy which portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors,
Night’s Dream their interactions with the Duke of Athens, Theseus, the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, and with the
(1623) 2 fairies who inhabit a moonlit forest.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/1ws1710.txt)

Shakespeare, W. As You Like It A pastoral comedy based upon the novel Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge. It follows the adventures of the
(1623) heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia and
Touchstone the court jester, to find safety and eventually love in the Forest of Arden.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/1ws2510.txt)

Shakespeare, W. The Tempest The play's main character is Prospero, the rightful but banished Duke of Milan, who uses his magical
(1623) powers to punish his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore. The entire play takes
place on an island whose native inhabitants, Ariel and Caliban, respectively aid and hinder his work.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/1ws4111.txt)

Shelley, M Frankenstein, or, The title of the novel refers to a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life and creates a
the Modern being in the likeness of man. It is often considered the first fully realized science fiction novel due to its
Prometheus pointed, though gruesome, focus on playing God by creating life from dead flesh.
(1818) (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm)

Tennyson, A.L. The Lady of AVictorian ballad which recasts Arthurian subject matter loosely based on medieval sources. The poem
Shalott (1833) narrates the story of a Lady who lives alone on an island upstream from Camelot and who is curse to see
the outside world only through a mirror in her room.
(http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/TENNLADY.html)

79
The Church of King James’s The Authorized Version is the translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by
England Bible (1611) the Church of England. The task of translation was undertaken by 47 scholars, commissioned by James I,
who worked in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of
Cambridge, and Westminster.
(http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/)

Tolkien, J.R.R. Silmarillion A collection of Tolkien's works edited and published posthumously which describes the universe of
(1977) Middle-earth from the creation of Eä, to the Downfall of Númenor and its people and the circumstances
which led to the events in Lord of the Rings.
(http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1253811714/ref=a9_sc_1?ie=UTF8&search-alias=stripbooks&field-
keywords=silmarillion)

Tolkien, J.R.R Lord of the An epic high fantasy novel whose influences include philology, mythology, and religion as well as
Rings (1954-55) Tolkien's experiences in World War I. It has inspired artwork, music, films and television, video games,
and subsequent literature.
(http://www.tolkien.co.uk/Pages/ProductDetails.aspx?ISBN=9780261103252)

Wordsworth, W. Lyrical Ballads Generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature.
and S.T. (1789-1800) Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only
Coleridge four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, ‘The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.’
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/8lbal10h.htm)
(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8bal110.txt)

1. Year of the first official publication, as entered in the Stationers’ Company.

2. The plays were published in the 1623 First Folio, a collection of Shakespeare’s writings edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell.
The British Library holds five original copies.

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APPENDIX C - A metaphor for the EFL classroom

Trainers’ Notes

Training context: ITE programmes and/or CPD events

Format: workshop
Length: 90 minutes
Number of participants: approx. 25
Language proficiency level: upper-intermediate onwards

Procedures:

Task 1. Introduce the concept of metaphor, firstly by eliciting the meaning of the word.
Tell participants that one of the possible definitions is the one given by the Oxford
Online Dictionary and refer participants to the worksheet. Participants discuss the
questions in pairs or small groups. After that, ask participants to share their ideas with
the whole group.
about 15-20 minutes.

Task 2. Comment briefly that the garden and the theatre are quite often used by teachers
and ELT writers as a metaphor to describe the ELT classroom and ask participants to
discuss the possible similarities and differences between these images, contrasting and
contrasting the physical space, the objects and materials, the role of the teacher and
students in each metaphor.
about 15-20 minutes.

Task 3. Distribute blank sheets of A4 or A3 paper, felt pens or other drawing materials.
Give participants enough time to think about their own metaphors. When they finish
their drawings, invite them to show their work and comment on their choice and the
reasons for that. You may decide to make a display of their work on the walls of the
training room.
about 40-50 minutes.

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Participants’ worksheet

Metaphors for the EFL Classroom

Task 1. What is a metaphor? Read the definition below and discuss the questions in pairs or
small groups.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that goes further than a simile, either by saying that
something is something else that it could not normally be called, e.g.

• The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas

• Stockholm, the Venice of the North

or by suggesting that something appears, sounds, or behaves like something else, e.g.

• burning ambition
• the long arm of the law
• blindingly obvious.

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/jargonbuster/i-o/metaphor?view=uk

• Metaphors are not only used in literature; they are part of our everyday language when
we use figurative language and idioms, especially when we talk about concepts and
feelings. For example, can you think of at least two metaphors for Love?
• In your opinion, why do people use metaphors?

Task 2. Metaphors are frequently used by some ELT writers. Look at the pictures below and
discuss with your partner what these things could have in common with the English language
classroom.

Task 3. Use your imagination ☺

What is your own metaphor for the EFL classroom? Draw it in a sheet of paper and write some
notes about it. What are the similarities and differences? Why have you chosen it?
Show your drawing to your colleagues and share your ideas about it.

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APPENDIX D - This is my story: teachers’ biographies

Trainers’ Notes

Training context: ITE programmes and/or CPD events

Format: workshop
Length: 90 minutes
Number of participants: approx. 25
Language proficiency level: upper-intermediate onwards

Procedures:

Task 1. Start the session telling participants that you are going to tell them the story of
how you became an EFL teacher and teacher trainer. You may decide to create a
PowerPoint presentation with some personal photos for that. Invite questions and then
conclude referring participants to the worksheet. Give them some minutes to think about
the questions and then ask them to discuss their answers in pairs or small groups.

about 30-40 minutes.

Task 2. Explain that origin of the extract and give participants time to read it and
underline the parts of the text that call their attention. Discuss the questions in small
groups or as a whole group.
about 30 minutes.

Task 3. Ask participants if they have any experience writing journals. Ask them to take
some notes based on Task 1 and assign the writing as a follow-up activity. If students
are interested in creating a blog and if you have access to the internet you may decide to
show them how to open a personal blog. Provide some links.
about 20 minutes.

Wordpress http://wordpress.com/
Blogger https://www.blogger.com/start

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Participants’ worksheet

This is my story…

Task 1. Every story has a beginning and the story of your career as an English language
teacher is not different. Take some minutes in silence to think about the following questions and
then share your thoughts with your partner.

• Do you remember the first time you considered the possibility of becoming an EFL
teacher? When was it?
• What was your first lesson or teaching practice session like? Where and when was it?
Do you remember your students? How were you feeling before getting into the
classroom? And when you left?
• Who are the people that have influenced you and your ‘teaching style’ so far?

Task 2. Read the extract below, which was taken from a teacher’s blog. What are the
advantages and disadvantages, if any, of keeping a teacher’s journal? Why do most ITE
courses nowadays include this sort of writing as part of the assessment process? How can
teachers’ biographies help in the process of professional development?

Setting off
September 30, 2008

Yesterday it was our first session with our tutor and he started with a couple of ice-breakers,
including that one of drawing the professional road that took us to this course. There was no
time to talk to everyone in the group but we will certainly learn more about each others’
backgrounds next Thursday, when each of us will make a brief presentation about our
professional profiles.

Our tutor has also asked us to start a learning journal and so here I am. He also gave us a
couple of questions to guide us in our reflections. I’ll come back to some of them in future
posts. Today I just want to say that what really called my attention in the group is how much in
common and how much different we are. Common ground comes from ELT teaching; diversity
comes from cultural, geographical and historical backgrounds. How productive and able to
develop and mature this group will be will depend a lot on what we can make of both
similarities and differences. This is true for any working group I suppose, but the fact that we
are just six will make things much more complex.

Task 3. Use your imagination ☺

Imagine you have decided to start your own teacher’s journal, either writing notes on a
notebook or creating your online blog. Write an entry about the beginning of your teaching
career or the beginning of your Initial Teacher Education course. Use your thoughts and notes
from Task 1 to write your text.

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APPENDIX E - Film narratives: Mona Lisa Smile

Trainers’ Notes

Training context: ITE programmes and/or CPD events

Format: workshop
Length: 90 minutes
Number of participants: approx. 25
Language proficiency level: upper-intermediate onwards

Procedures:

Task 1. Start by asking participants if the have seen or heard of the film Mona Lisa
Smile. If so, elicit some information about it. You may decide to create a PowerPoint
presentation with some screenshots of the film or, if you have access to the internet, you
may decide to browse through the film official website and explore some of its
interactive features (http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/monalisasmile/).
After that, refer participants to the worksheet and ask them to discuss the questions in
pairs or small groups.
about 30-40 minutes.

Task 2. Refer students to the information about Van Gog’s Sunflowers in the worksheet
and tell them that you are going to watch a scene of the film related to the painting.
After watching it, ask students to discuss in small groups what they think the main
messages conveyed in the scene are. You may decide to have a whole group discussion
as well.
about 20-30 minutes.

Task 3. Refer students to Task 3 in the worksheet. If they have not watched any related
films, you may suggest a few titles such as Dead Poets Society, Brilliant Minds, or
Renaissance Man.. Depending on the training context you may ask students to submit
their piece of writing or write it as part of their portfolio/journal. End the session
showing the scene in which Ms. Watson receives her students’ on versions of Van
Gogh’s painting.
about 20 minutes.

85
Participants’ worksheet

Mona Lisa Smile

Task 1. Some films have teachers as main characters. One of the most recent of these films is
Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts. Read the plot summary below and discuss the
questions with your colleagues.

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Katherine Ann Watson has accepted a position teaching art history at the prestigious Wellesley
College. Watson is a very modern woman, particularly for the 1950s, and has a passion not
only for art but for her students. For the most part, the students all seem to be biding their time,
waiting to find the right man to marry. The students are all very bright and Watson feels they
are not reaching their potential. Although a strong bond is formed between teacher and
student, Watson's views are incompatible with the dominant culture of the college.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304415/plotsummary

• Do you know any other films where the teacher develops a special relationship with
his/her students? Tell your colleagues about the plot.
• What are the similarities and differences between these fictional stories and life stories
of real teachers? What can these stories tell us about the process of teaching/learning?

Task 2. In one scene of the film Ms. Watson discuss with her students the activity of creating
replicas of a famous Van Gogh work through painting by numbers. Watch the scene and, in
pairs, discuss what you think the main messages conveyed in the scene are.

This is one of four paintings of sunflowers dating from August and

September 1888. Van Gogh intended to decorate Gauguin's room with
these paintings in the so-called Yellow House that he rented in Arles in
the South of France.

The dying flowers are built up with thick brushstrokes. The impasto
evokes the texture of the seed-heads. Van Gogh produced a replica of
this painting in January 1889, and perhaps another one later in the year.
The various versions and replicas remain much debated among Van
Gogh scholars.

http://nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gogh-sunflowers

© Copyright The National Gallery 2009

Task 3. Use your imagination ☺

Write a critical review of another film whose plot involves a teacher and his/her students. Briefly
summarise the plot and tell how relevant this story is for your professional development as an
ELT teacher.

86
APPENDIX F - Novel narratives: Hard Times

Trainers’ Notes
Training context: ITE programmes and/or CPD events
Format: workshop
Length: 90 minutes
Number of participants: approx. 25
Language proficiency level: upper-intermediate onwards

Procedures:

Task 1. The objective here is to unpack participants’ classroom experiences as learners

and the treatment their own imagination received in their learning process. Ask
participants to share some information about these episodes with their partners. Some
may have reservations to share their experiences publicly. Acknowledge their right to
privacy and ask them just to ponder on such events.
about 20-30 minutes.

Task 2. Set the scene for Dickens’s Novel Hard Times. Some participants may have
read it and, if so, elicit some information about it. Provide bibliography and links to the
novel, in case participants feel interested in reading the whole text. Ask participants to
read the extract silently and then discuss the questions in pairs or small groups. You
may want to have a brief whole group discussion after that.
about 20-30 minutes.

Task 3. In pairs or small groups refer to Task 3 and give participants time to draw their
review and make their suggestions. Pairs or groups present their proposals to the whole
group.
about 30-40 minutes.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_0_10?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-
keywords=hard+times+charles+dickens&sprefix=Hard+Times

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/hardt10.txt
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/charlesdickens/HardTimes/Chap1.html

87
Participants’ worksheet
Hard Times

Task 1. Can you remember any situation in the classroom when you were a child or teenager
that you believe has had implications for the way you see teaching/learning nowadays? Would
you share some information about it with your partner?

Task 2. Hard Times is Dickens’ tenth novel and the plot highlights the social and economic
pressures of Victorian times and the divide between capitalistic mill owners and undervalued
workers. The first scene happens is the ‘plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room.’ Read
the extract below where the teacher and Mr. Gradgrind warn one of the little pupils about the
dangers of ‘fancying.’

'So you would carpet your room - or your husband's room, if you were a grown
woman, and had a husband - with representations of flowers, would you?' said the
gentleman. 'Why would you?'
'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.
'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking
over them with heavy boots?'
'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They
would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy - '
'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so
happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.'
'You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of
that kind.'
'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/charlesdickens/HardTimes/chap2.html

• Do you remember doing any activities at school that stimulated your imagination and
creativity? What were they?
• Why do you think that after primary school, imagination and creativity are usually absent
from classroom activities?
• Would developing their own imagination help teachers to become better professionals?
If so, how?

Task 3. Use your imagination ☺

Imagine you have been asked to participate in a committee that will review the syllabus of a
teacher education programme in order to include more imaginative content to it. What kind of
‘modules’ would you include and what sort of materials would you use to achieve this goal? In
small groups prepare a short proposal with some suggestions.

88
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