An Imaginal Perspective in Education

Educative culture is nowadays marked by approaches, ideas, representations and interpretations of "scientific disciplines" used to analyse its main themes and problems. This certainly contributes to grant pedagogy a scientific status and provides teachers and educators with clear interpretation patterns and useful educational tools, but often limits their sensibility, forcing them to assume a rationalistic, conceptual, reductive and judging attitude towards the complex educative phenomena they have to face every day. In contrast to this fashion we propose the imaginal approach aiming to recognise and include creative imagination among the knowing and comprehension procedures of Educational Sciences, moving from the ancient tradition of symbolic imagination of the hermetic philosophy, the studies of Jung, Hillman, Durand, Bachelard Corbin, Wunenburger, Bonardel who restored and supported the power of “creative”, “active” or “archetypal” imagination as a more affective and participative way of building knowledge which is still alive in arts. By means of a methodology based on symbolic hermeneutics, beginning from significant poems, movies, paintings, music pieces this approach also intends to stimulate the imaginative attitude of educators, teachers, and enrich their imaginary on themes of particular educational interest (childhood, adolescence, maturity, pain, death, love, sex,…) drawn from the extraordinary repository of archetypal images, myths and symbols that our tradition offers. This communication will introduce the basic features of an imaginal perspective in education, and illustrate its methodology.