Il Southern Centre for Digital Transformation ospiterà Helen Burns, ricercatrice ed art educator presso la School of Education della Unviversity of Glasgow.

 

Giovedì 22, dalle 15 alle 17, presso l'aula Southern Centre presenterà la sua ricerca che esplora il potenziale nesso tra immaginazione, educazione e social agency. Venerdì 23, dalle 10 alle 12, a partire da questa avrà luogo un laboratorio volto ad esplorare tramite metodi artistici il tema delle digital materialities.

 

Abstract

Against any narrow notion of creativity, Helen Burns addresses the concept of imagination, investigating its emergent models and exploring its relationship with cognition and metacognition, defined as one's knowledge concerning one's own cognitive process and products (Flavell 1979, 1999). Through this exploration, she engages with questions regarding whether a combined focus on imagination and metacognition could be potent in cultivating personal and social agency. As imagination is essential for originality and for enabling to see beyond current states and given orders of things, it is therefore crucial in addressing posthuman convergences of structural injustice, environmental crisis, and the meaning of being human in light of rapid and constant technological and scientific change (Burns, 2024). Thus, while neoliberal rationality frequently charges imaginative acts as attempts to dodge reality, imagination may also work towards the production of absent (not-yet, not-here, or possible) realities.

 

Moving from this conjunct interest in imagination and metacognition, Burns develops and applies cognitive and metacognitive models of imagination. One of her empirical projects, Imagination Agents, engages with young people exploring the chances towards personal agency through an experiential process designed to nurture metacognition of their imagination (Burns, 2024). While methodologically and analytically dense, the project embraces the absence of right answers and the subjectivity that are typical of art as a discipline, allowing students to be in charge of their own open, uncontrolled and uncontrollable imaginative processes.

 

The accountability agenda is prevailing in many of our contemporary education systems, to the extent that Giroux speaks of school as "disimagination machines" (Giroux 2014). Hence, Burns' work is an invitation to acknowledge, and respond to, the need to generate a "healthier attitude to and provision for imaginative learning experiences" (Burns 2024).