"Over the Rainbow": Fantasy Lands, Dream Worlds, and Magic Kingdoms

The imagination crisis

Joe Roach’s seminar explored “utopias and wonderful but impossible places” and the works that share them.  Characters from Dorothy Gale to Peter Pan to Puck were our tour guides and their stories our maps.  One world which we inhabited was that of the subjunctive—that tense of the “what if,” the imagined or conditional.  While the subjunctive mood is no longer much-used in the English language, its literary possibilities are endless. What if a cyclone carries Dorothy away from Kansas?  What if Wendy and her brothers were to fly with Peter to Neverland?  What if Oberon were to decide to interfere with the mortals, and what if Puck were to screw it up?  The charming nature of the content was alluring.  I was excited about the fantastical nature of the texts; I was also acutely aware that my students might not be.  With a few exceptions, they have not appreciated the clever word play or settings in Harry Potter or felt comfortable in the futuristic setting of Divergent. 

My research stemming from the seminar attempted to explore why perceived challenges of imagination exist commonly across our classrooms, what the consequences in the classroom and students’ lives might be, and what a teacher can do about it while engaging students in meaningful and appropriate academic work.

In seminar we learned the term paracosm, of which a common definition is “a prolonged fantasy world invented by children,” that “can have a definite geography and language and history.”²  (Wordnet definition)  It is the kind of imagination we assume our students have as younger children and which fuels their play.  In fact, there is a difference in this psychological context between fantasy and imagination as explained by Serena Konkin.³  This distinction is relevant to classrooms like mine where trauma is likely.  The “imaginal instinct halts after trauma, whereupon fantasy takes over.”  Children can flee to their imaginations to escape physical and mental unhealthy and traumatic reality.  “A kind of imaginal muteness occurs, with the creative processes now only in service to defense rather than meaning.”  On the other hand, imagination is a creative source, allowing us to consider alternative emotions and outcomes, including “unicorns and future events.”  It is the source of creative design, solutions, and art, of every “made object.”⁴ (Brahic)  Research suggests that paracosm in childhood is associated with positive outcomes on cognitive development as well as adult success in a variety of fields.⁵ (Bernstein 421)  While certainly not the only measure of adult success, we can assume that the lack of exercised imagination may lead to less success.  Those young people have had the benefit of working out a variety of things.  “Childhood imagination can be seen both as a way to safely explore the real world and as a dress rehearsal for adult imagination,” arguably some of the most important uses of a child’s imagination.⁶ (Brahic)  Paracosm as a specific aspect of a child’s developing imagination relates, I think, to the genres we might associate with it, like fantasy and science fiction and our students’ willingness to read them.  However, I do not think the term has to be restrictive to young children and their fantasy worlds.  Our own students can create their own paracosms, re-make their own realities, and explore their imaginations now, as well. 

It turns out that this kind of creative imagination, as measured by a standard creative quotient (CQ) score has been declining among school children across the country since 1990.  In addition to the more personal obstructions individual students face in cultivating imaginative thought, nationally our school systems, curricula, and dependence on objective assessment have also been cited as culprits.⁷  (Bronson). 

This is a common problem in many of our urban classrooms—as verified by those represented in our seminar, from 1^st grade through high school.  We perceive our own students to be challenged with restricted imagination in higher concentrations. What I see often lacking in my classroom adheres to Keiichi Takaya’s definition of imagination, when “a person has the ability and tendency to think of things in a way that is not tightly constrained by the actual, such as conventions, cultural norms, one’s habitual thought, and information given by others.”⁸ (Takaya/imag bk 23)  We know intuitively that restricted imagination and curiosity have negative effects on success in life and the classroom.  We see cleverness and creativity in the execution of their social media presence, but the content and message are startlingly similar from student to student, representing an urban vernacular with a set and shared set of values. Watching other young people’s parking lot fights over and over is a preferred use of free time at school.  I perceive a false ceiling that limits curiosity and creativity. Limitations in their learning, curiosity, and imaginative play and exploration persist through their teen years.  While their lives are measured out in small screens, the world they will grow into is all the time becoming more complex and demanding.