Can You Picture It? Curricular Imagination for the Transformative Art of Theological Education

This forum presents the written text (with added introduction) of remarks given at the installation of Mai-Anh Le Tran as academic dean at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Naming the “colonial design” (Jennings) buttressing contemporary theological education, Tran wonders how the cultivation of educational imagination might invigorate a vibrant and vital place-based curriculum for theological discovery and formation that does not anesthetize, but rather awakens our full, unfinished selves for sense-filled meaning-making and “utopian social dreaming” for the transformative art of religious leadership in changing and challenging times.

Camus and Tragedy in Education

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.

O osobliwościach dyskursów w edukacji

The basic goal of the text is to follow the work strategy on selected pedagogical concepts as part of educational discourses. I assume that within the framework of the functioning of discursive practices in education, a certain work is done, which flattens the conceptual grid regarding education. Thus, these concepts are unambiguous, boil down to the most direct, superficial and obvious meaning. The way of thinking about education, present in the dominant discourses located in the social circulation, causes that educational processes are devoid of meaning wealth. This is how it sets the playing field in thinking about education, designing educational policy and educational practice. The treatment, which is to restore the educational discourses to depth, aporethism, internal struggle, the element of contradiction is to launch a specific etymological work that reveals the fuller meaning of the basic concepts that build the educational imagination. Thanks to this, a certain contrast will also be created between the extracted meaning and those meanings that are promoted in the most varied discursive practices launched in the field of education

Boundaries of the Educational Imagination

The educational imagination is the capacity to think critically beyond our located, daily experiences of education. It breaks away from the immediacy of personal understanding by placing education within wider, deeper and longer contexts. Boundaries of the Educational Imagination develops the educational imagination by answering six questions: Each question goes on a journey towards limit points in education so that educational processes can be placed within a bigger framework that allows new possibilities, fresh options and more critical engagement. These questions are then pulled together into a structuring framework enabling the reader to grasp how this complex subject works.