EduCon 2027Dreaming New Worlds: (Re)Imagining Imagination as a Literacy Practice
We often encourage young people to "use their imagination,” but what do we mean by that? In schools, imagination is often associated with creativity, play, the arts, or dreaming about the future. What might change if we understood imagination not as an occasional activity, but as literacy practice young people use to make meaning of themselves, their experiences, and the world around them?
This conversation begins with imahinasyon as literacy, a framework developed through my research along queer Filipinx youth. Their brilliance, knowledge, and experiences pushed me to reconsider imagination beyond an individual creative act. Instead, it helped me consider it as a cultural, critical, relational, and collective practice connected to thinking about identities, possibility, our becoming, and futurity.
Instead of positioning imahinasyon as literacy as a universal, static framework, I offer it as an entry point for collective inquiry. Together, we will examine where imagination currently lives in our classrooms and schools, where it may be constrained, and what becomes possible when we intentionally create conditions for young people to imagine.
This conversation is threaded by Educon’s question: “Who are the kids the world will need?” We add on to this question by considering: What if the responsibility of imagination is to not just prepare young people for the world they will inherit, but to cultivate their capacity to question it, imagine beyond what currently exists, and create new and better worlds?
Conversational Practice
This conversation will invite participants to experience imagination through multimodal and collective practice. We will start by an interactive mapping activity that asks us all to consider: Where does imagination currently live in our classrooms and schools? Where is it encouraged, constrained, or absent?
After a brief introduction to imahinasyon as literacy and the queer Filipinx youth whose knowledge informed the framework, participants will engage in a multimodal imagination experience. Using writing, drawing, collage, or mapping, participants will respond to this inquiry: if imagination was treated as seriously as reading, writing, and math, what might school look, sound, and feel like?
Participants will share their creations in small groups, identifying patterns, tensions, possibilities, and questions across their imagined schools. These artifacts will be used as texts for dialogue and conversation. What did we imagine? What made those possibilities difficult to imagine within current educational structures? Whose imagines are currently nurtured, and whose are constrained?
We will close by co-creating a collective “imagination map” that includes ideas, questions, and possibilities for cultivating imagination across aspects of schools including curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, relationships, and school structures. Participants will leave with one possibility they might want to experiment within their own educational community.
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