Ecological education is becoming a major area of interest worldwide, and schools are increasingly being called upon to address global and local ecological concerns. Unfortunately, most teachers have limited or no training in the knowledge and skills required to support their students' sense of connection to the natural world. Moreover, they have been trained to teach in ways that often marginalize the imagination in learning. This book illustrates how imagination and the development of ecological understanding are closely connected. It offers teachers a practical guide to teaching in ecological and imaginative ways - needed support to establishing more ecologically-oriented education in all classrooms. As imagination takes a central position in schools, all teaching and learning can improve as a result.

Offering a rich understanding of the nature and roles of wonder in general, this book provides multiple suggestions for how to revive wonder in adults (teachers and curriculum makers) and how to keep wonder alive in children. Its aim is to show that adequate education needs to take seriously the task of evoking wonder about the content of the curriculum and to show how this can routinely be done in everyday classrooms. It presents strong arguments based on either research or precisely described experience for the importance of wonder as a central educational concept, and show how this argument can be seen to work itself out in daily practice.

Ecological education is becoming a major area of interest worldwide, and schools are increasingly being called upon to address global and local ecological concerns. Unfortunately, most teachers have limited or no training in the knowledge and skills required to support their students' sense of connection to the natural world. Moreover, they have been trained to teach in ways that often marginalize the imagination in learning. This book illustrates how imagination and the development of ecological understanding are closely connected. It offers teachers a practical guide to teaching in ecological and imaginative ways - needed support to establishing more ecologically-oriented education in all classrooms. As imagination takes a central position in schools, all teaching and learning can improve as a result.

For many children much of the time their experience in classrooms can be rather dull, and yet the world the school is supposed to initiate children into is full of wonder. This book offers a rich understanding of the nature and roles of wonder in general and provides multiple suggestions for to how to revive wonder in adults (teachers and curriculum makers) and how to keep it alive in children. Its aim is to show that adequate education needs to take seriously the task of evoking wonder about the content of the curriculum and to show how this can routinely be done in everyday classrooms. The authors do not wax flowery; they present strong arguments based on either research or precisely described experience, and demonstrate how this argument can be seen to work itself out in daily practice. The emphasis is not on ways of evoking wonder that might require virtuoso teaching, but rather on how wonder can be evoked about the everyday features of the math or science or social studies curriculum in regular classrooms.

Students' imaginations are often considered as something that might be engaged after the hard work of learning has been done. Countering such beliefs, Egan and Judson show that the imagination-one of the great workhorses of learning-can be used to make all learning and all teaching more effective. Through techniques that any teacher can learn and easily apply in any classroom, they demonstrate how and why imagination can be used across the curriculum and grade levels to make teaching and learning more interesting, engaging, and pleasurable for all. Teachers who use these techniques will discover the emotions, images, stories, metaphors, sense of wonder, heroic narratives, and other cognitive tools that can bring life and energy to their classroom. This practical handbook will help teachers learn how to use these enlivening techniques in their daily practice to stimulate students' intellectual activity and growth.

Engaging Imagination in Ecological Education illustrates how to connect students to the natural world and encourage them to care about a more sustainable, ecologically secure planet. Cultivating ecological understanding requires reimagining the human world as part of, not apart from, nature. Describing the key principles of an approach to teaching called Imaginative Ecological Education (IEE), this book offers a practical guide for all teachers (K-12). It is designed for use with any curriculum to give students opportunities to engage their bodies, emotions, and imaginations in the world around them, thereby making learning meaningful.