{"data":{"ID":1599,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1791147722,"CreatorID":79,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Dreaming New Worlds: (Re)Imagining Imagination as a Literacy Practice","Handle":"dreaming_new_worlds--re-imagining_imagination_as_a_literacy_practice","ShortDescription":"What if imagination were treated as a literacy practice? Grounded in imahinasyon as literacy, a framework developed from my research alongside queer Filipinx youth, this conversation invites educators to reconsider how imagination lives in our schools and explore how young people might understand themselves, question the world, and envision new worlds.","Description":"We often encourage young people to \"use their imagination,\u201d 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? \r\n\r\nThis 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. \r\n\r\nInstead 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. \r\n\r\nThis conversation is threaded by Educon\u2019s question: \u201cWho are the kids the world will need?\u201d 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?","Link":[],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"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?\r\n\r\nAfter 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?\r\n\r\nParticipants 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?\r\n\r\nWe will close by co-creating a collective \u201cimagination map\u201d 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.","Presenter":["Dr. Andre Zarate"],"PresenterAffiliation":["titodredreaming","LLC"],"PresenterEmail":["anthony.andre.zarate@gmail.com"],"ScheduleSlotID":null,"ScheduleLocationID":null,"SubmitterID":79,"AdditionalComments":null,"LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":14}}