Literacy and Imagination in Learning

Literacy and Imagination in Learning

Based on reading literature around the development of literacy, reality in purpose of literacy in school settings, and the observation experiences with a reading intervention class in a high school, the purpose of this paper was attempting to seek the meaning of building literacy by reflecting the fact that imagination should be the necessary center of learning, and to reconsider the potentials of peer tutoring that provide scaffolding in understanding the world around them. Literacy might be a kind of social practices acquired from recognizing diversity of genres, style and types of texts in reading and writing associated with activities, domains or social identities with others. Vygotsky asserts that children develop specific models of communication, expression and explanation by playing and interacting with others at home and at school. focused on the connections between people and the sociocultural context in which they act and interact in shared experiences to communicate needs, and the internalization of these tools led to higher thinking skills. This study focused on classifying the role and intention of the inquiries and imaginative actions from the two tutees, Coleman and Wesley because the tutors’ utterances were composed of pretenders that teacher-like questions such as 'what are you thinking about this book so far?' or 'what are you thinking what’s going to happen in the story?'. Additionally, the tutees did use non-interrogative inquiries to express their thoughts, and it was a little confused to analyze. From the point of view that literacy might be improved by abundant experiences of inquiries and imaginative actions, first of all, the definition of imagination as the mental movement to explore, inquiring and creating a person’s idea beyond the known knowledge. There were four findings from this research: (1) active agents beyond engagement, (2) demonstration and engagement, (3) exploration with inner talk of wondering, and (4) application to the real world. Throughout this process of learning and exploring the concept of inquiry and imagination with the students, the ways of thinking and building knowledge by picking up one little piece by piece of the new world of inquiry and imagination from inside and outside were experienced during this project. Also, the concepts in real educational settings were examined through the program, meeting a lot of ambiguity and possibilities. As Ed mentioned, this class and experience could be one of learning that students take knowledge out of and in the real world to stretch their world of knowing. Adversely, we can change the starting point from ground level that students are main actor and teachers are supporters, instead of stances as a giver and receiver, and we just consider national and provincial curriculum as a just guideline.