키렌 이건의 상상력 활용 교육이론과 실천 (An Imaginative Approach to Educational Theory and Practice of Kieran Egan)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국교육사상학회
· 수록지 정보 : 교육사상연구 / 27권 / 3호 / 137 ~ 158페이지
· 저자명 : 김회용

초록

본 연구는 상상력 활용을 주창한 키렌 이건(Kieran Egan)의 교육이론과 교육실천을 논의하는데 연구의 목적을 두었다. 최근 교육학계에서 Egan이 주목받는 이유는 어린이들의 내재된 상상력을 활용할 수 있는 교수·학습법을 제안할 뿐만 아니라 직접 실천하고 있기 때문이다.
Egan은 현대의 교육이 위기에 처한 이유를 ‘구체적인 것에서 추상적인 것으로’라는 일반화할 수 없는, 임시방편의 원리에 기초하여 교수 학습 활동이 진행되고 있다는 점과 사회화, 이데아 및 발달이론이라는 서로 양립할 수 없는 관점의 조합이 교육을 지배하기 때문으로 보았다.
Egan은 현대 교육이 직면한 문제를 해결하는 방법으로 ‘교육을 이해의 연속’으로 묘사하는 새로운 이론을 제안하였다. 세계를 이해하기 위한 방법으로 Egan은 역사적으로 발달되어온 인지도구인 신체적, 신화적, 낭만적, 철학적, 반어적 이해를 제안하고, 이러한 지적 도구를 획득하여 문화와 세상을 이해하는 능력을 계발할 필요가 있다고 보았다.
이러한 능력을 계발하기 위해 Egan은 인류의 축적된 중요한 문화적 도구를 학생의 인지도구로 최대한 전환할 필요가 있음을 제안하면서, 주요 인지도구의 습득에 초점을 맞춘 교수 학습을 강조하였다. 또한 학습자에게 참된 공부의 기쁨을 제공하기 위해 작은 단위의 주제를 깊이 있게 학습(LiD)하도록 하는 학습법을 제안하였다.

영어초록

Kieran Egan is an educational philosopher whose emphasis on imagination, storytelling, and other tools of understanding offers new and provocative insights into what it means to be educated.
Egan suggests that not enough attention is given to the role imagination plays in education or in our vision of what it means to be educated. Instead of imagination, the modern world has embraced a set of ad hoc principles which continue to "have a pervasive and profound influence on teaching practice and curriculum design. "According to these principles, education proceeds "from the concrete to the abstract, from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, from active manipulation to symbolic conceptualization."Egan offers numerous counter-examples, not to debunk these ad hoc principles, but to suggest that they are not always the most effective way to educate and that they do not encompass the totality of education. To balance the widely accepted dictum that "children learn best from concrete, hand-on experiences," Egan explains that much of the literature for young children depends upon the child's prior understanding of various underlying, but abstract, concepts. Using the story Cinderella to illustrate his point, Egan notes that five-year-old children have no trouble understanding and enjoying his story, though such understanding is dependent on their ability to grasp such abstract and conflicting concepts as fear/hope, kindness/cruelty, and good/evil.
Egan offers us a new theory that "describes education in terms of a sequence of kinds of understanding." Suggesting that human beings developed multiple tools for understanding their world, Egan characterizes several distinctive ways of understanding as the Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic and Ironic ways of knowing. According to Egan, to be educated means to acquire "these kinds of understanding as fully as possible in the sequence in which each developed historically. In short, Egan proposes a new kind of recapitulation theory which, when combined with insights from Vygotsky, leads to a new educational idea.
Learning in Depth program (LiD) is designed as an additional contribution schools can make to students' education. Though relatively simple, it has the potential to make a major impact. The aim is to build knowledge, understanding, skills, and practices fundamental to effective learning. That sounds like a very weighty thing, but LiD is both easy to implement and does not cost much to do so, and yet it delivers a very considerable educational benefit to students, especially for developing students' imagination.

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