Is genius shaped by the imagination of childhood? Cobb's collection of autobiographies and biographies of creative people, as well as her observations of children's play, suggests just that. She sees the child to be innately connected with the natural world. Inner powers alone do not further the imagination. Her book remains an important philosophical meditation on the importance of children's deep experience of nature to their adult cognition and psychological well-being.

Recent scholarship on children’s literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary children’s books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in ‘ecocriticism’, as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers – young and old – of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of children’s literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how children’s literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which children’s literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with ‘nature’. Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how children’s literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination provides a comprehensive overview of research on the role of imagination in cognitive and social development and its link with children's understanding of the real world.

Inspired by papers developed for the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education: Imaginative Practice, Imaginative Inquiry (Canberra, Australia, 2008), this book connects a cross-section of educators, researchers and administrators in a dialogue and exploration of imaginative and creative ways of teaching, learning and conducting educational inquiry. Imagination is a concept that spans traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries. The authors in this book acknowledge diverse theoretical and practical allegiances, but they concur that imagination will play an essential role in the building of new foundations for education in the 21st century. From our conception of human development through our ways of educating teachers to the teaching of mathematics, they argue for the centrality of imagination in the realization of human potential, and for its relevance to the most urgent problems confronting our world. Introduced by a wide-ranging literature review and extensively referenced, this volume makes an important contribution to a rapidly expanding field.

The "tree" is the vertical dimension of aspiration, deepening, individual growth, and spiritual development. The "hoop" is the circular representation of our relationship with humanity and the earth. Using examples from Native American and other ancient traditions as well as modern psychology and systems science, Chris Hoffman shows readers how to develop both parts of the whole to help people lead lives of balance and fulfillment.

Imagination in Inquiry: A Philosophical Model and Its Applications investigates the nature, kinds, component elements, functions, scope, and uses of the imagination involved in inquiry. It further discusses how these kinds and functions vary and interact depending on the context of inquiries carried out in philosophy and its branches—from the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology to ethics, sociopolitical philosophy, and aesthetics—and institutions like science, technology, art, and education. Using a homeostatic model, A. Pablo Iannone advances a conception of the imagination as a disposition to search for answers to various types of problems, abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical faced in inquiry. The book treats this as a working characterization, though it develops progressively clearer, more precise, and less ambiguous meanings. All along, the primary concern of the author—as well as of contributors Alejandra Iannone and Rocci Luppicini—is with the moral, aesthetic, logical, communicative, scientific, technological, artistic, literary, and philosophical uses and roles of the imagination. The book’s primary focus is not just on such things as the capacity to generate mental images, but especially on the ability to discover and create, anticipate and envision, entertain and manage.