Imagination and Literacy

In her newest book, teacher researcher and bestselling author Karen Gallas carefully investigates imagination in the classroom to understand its function in literacy learning. Using rich examples from her elementary classrooms, she proposes that imagination is a central, but untapped, component of learning across all subject areas—language arts, science, social studies, and math. Getting to the heart of a theme that has been a strong undercurrent in her previous books, Gallas examines:

• The changes to teaching that occur when imagination is placed at the center of the learning process.
• How students naturally use imagination to further their own learning.
• Three key areas of literacy learning—identity, discourse acquisition, and authoring—to develop a new conception of the teacher’s role in the literacy classroom.
• A theoretical framework for literacy learning that crosses subject areas and grade levels, including examples of student dialog, writing, artwork, and classroom projects.
• A long-term teacher research study, demonstrating how it reshaped a teacher’s practice.

Karen Gallas is an early childhood and elementary teacher with more than 30 years of experience in urban and rural public schools. She has published three books, The Languages of Learning, Talking Their Way Into Science, and “Sometimes I Can Be Anything,” all by Teachers College Press.

“Karen Gallas shares persuasive insights that will be of importance to educators at all levels. As one pre-service teacher put it after reading the book, ‘I am now inspired to unleash the imagination of my students and see where it takes us!’”
—Gordon Wells, University of California at Santa Cruz

“Karen Gallas’s inquiry into imagination and literacy is an engaging illustration of the power of inquiry to inform teaching while making a substantial contribution to current theory and research on the meaning and power of imagination.”
—Curt Dudley-Marling, Lynch School of Education, Boston College

“Eloquent and intellectual…Karen Gallas offers us insights from her teaching journal and connections to philosophers from Freire to Bakhtin, showing teachers and researchers how to re-envision and improve our work with our students. I LOVED this book and have already recommended it to colleagues and friends.”
— Ruth Shagoury, author of A Workshop of the Possible, Mary Stuart Rogers Professor of Education at Lewis & Clark College