Teaching, Learning, and Living Imaginatively: Committing to Possibilities by Forming Spaces for Nourishing Relational Imagination

• In Event: Places of Possibility, Cultures of Connection: Exploring Art, Design, Making, and Imagination in Enacting Educational Alternatives

Abstract

Dominating narratives and systems of power harm us all (people and other animals, the earth), though the felt presences of harms are inequitably distributed. This is felt within the long-increasing presences of ecological disharmony and white supremacy in daily life, to name a few. Within nondominant communities, life as ‘otherwise’ (Greene, 1997) both flourishes and becomes threatened. Schooling is one such threatening institution, as named repeatedly by education scholars working toward liberatory potentials (Dyke, Meyerhoff & Evol, 2018; Gutierrez et al, 2017; Keenan, 2017; Love, 2019; Shalaby, 2017). Imagination and play, often relegated to supposedly ‘nonacademic’ spaces of the arts, or as solely in the work of childhood, are necessary dreaming practices for relational and cultural negotiation. An educational landscape of increasing standardization and high-stakes testing makes attempts at committing to the work of what could be sites of struggle. It is no accident that schooling in the United States and beyond is moving further away from education toward possibility.
Within such demands, there are educators that have maintained that imagination and play are vital for teaching, learning, and living. Taking a collective look toward the ways educators are cultivating and noticing imagination and play with/in their activities can begin to highlight what makes this necessary work possible. Expanding from Greene’s (1997) ideas developed primarily within the arts, and in response to calls to expand our ways of seeing the everyday practices within nondominant communities (Gutierrez et al, 2017), I consider how imagination is or could be engaged across the lifespan and (extra)disciplinary contexts. In particular, I consider how the imagination is engaged in teaching and learning relationships. For this theoretical inquiry, I draw on my experiences as a queer arts educator in a variety of hybrid spaces in collaboration with educators and young people, along with relevant theoretical and empirical literature. I commit to the process of answering the question: “How might educators across disciplines attune to, cultivate and sustain everyday expressions and processes of possibility?”
In bringing together theory with some locations for future design work, I offer a framework-in-process for an attention to possibility through relational imagination, in formal and informal learning spaces. In this theory-in-process, I articulate relational imagination in teaching and learning as ever-forming across (i) social, (ii) spatial-temporal, (iii) affective, and (iv) aesthetic dimensions. My analysis offers ways of thinking about how forming these dimensions, and especially their interactions, can invite openings for what could be. I then offer a few locations for designing for relational imagination within teaching and learning relationships in: (a) relationships with ourselves and each other, (b) relationships with concepts, and (c) relationships with materials.
I propose that these dimensions and locations are some ways fellow educators might create expansive learning spaces. Never neutral, efforts to sustain dreaming toward and practicing how we could be—and want to be—together, are long-practiced political projects. How educators, in collaboration with young people, make possibilities possible, and flourish, is one vital consideration in a constellation of deeply hopeful and necessary work.

Author

• Ali Blake, Boston College