Kieran Egan was born in Ireland in 1942, but educated in England. He is an educational philosopher who has written about Education and Child's development. He is the director of the Imaginative Educational Research Group and currently works at Simon Fraser University. He graduated at the University of London in 1966, worked in secondary schools for two years and during a year at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston-upon-Thames. After that he moved to the USA where he started his career of Philosophy of Education at Stanford University. In 1991 he was granted the Grawemeyer Award in Education and two years later was elected as the first person in Education to the Royal Society of Canada. From that moment onwards he received many other prizes because of his work.
He wrote more than twenty books including: Imagination in Teaching and Learning and Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits and clockwork Oranges. In 1997 he published his major work, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive tools shape our understanding; Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: our progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey and Jean Piaget (2002) and Teaching literacy: engaging the imagination of new readers and writers (2006).

Kieran Egan created the Imaginative Pedagogy, an extremely new approach about education in which he points out the importance of imagination and fantansy as two essential elements to make learning meanful.

He tries to change the traditional focus on education according to which children learn if they undergo from the concret thinking to the abstract one. It is assumed that children's thinking is concrete, simple and engaged with their local experience, and that children's learning starts from what is known by them. He wonders how if that is so and children's minds are restricted to the everyday details of their social lives, why they are plenty of talking animanls, monsters and emotions. For this reason, Egan explains it cannot be justified that children are not taught History on their first forms at school because they lack the necessary abstract knowledge to understand it. All the contrary, this author indicates that children own the tools they need to give sense to History, learn about the past, understand the struggle for freedom and that they may use those concepts to learn about aspects of the world and experience.

For Egan, the traditional educational theory does not take into account the most valuable tools young learners have and use to give meaning to their experience and to the new information they are exposed to: these tools are imagination and fantasy.

He claims educational institutions should be less political and pay more attention to children's emotions. Consequently, he insists on the development of knowledge according to the level of comprehension of the world every child has.

The author of Teaching as Story Telling describes three stages of cognitive development: oral language, literacy tools and abstract thinking. The first one includes cognitive tools like tales, rhythm, jokes, plays, humour, fears, passions, metaphors, mystery and hopes. The second stage involves a sense of wonder and reality, idealism, revolt and leterate eye; and finally, a search for authority and truth, a sense of abstract reality and a sense of agency form part of the theoretical thinking. The acquisition of these tools leads students to their educational development.

Moreover, his theory promotes creativity in the classroom. His main purpose is to engage, stimulate and develope children's imagination and cope with the connection between the latter, emotion and learning. To get this goal he encourages teachers to use different strategies to activate students' fantasy and emotions.

Egan is convinced that children's imagination may become the basis for a successful learning and drive them to increase creativity and flexibility. However, this issue is a difficult stuff to deal with. According to him, generating images from words is relevant to imaginative development. In spite of that, traditional education almost prevents students from doing that by providing them with stereotypical features and images all the time interrupting their fantansy.

He draws on the curriculum content as a whole emphasising that the different areas of the curriculum (language, social studies, maths, science, art) should be shaped to help achieve this aim and supply what he notices as lacking: an educational theory that stresses imagination. He says it is necessary to incorporate learning activities which outline prominent characteristics of students'creativity in order to awaken imagination and intelligence in the classroom.

His approach puts meaning-centre stage. He focuses on children's fantasy stories: Egan considers crucial to know how to use the power of the story form (that is cultural universal) to teach any content in a meanful and clear way. Kieran Egan explains that story reflects an elemental and mightful form through which people make sense of the world and experience. Knowing that children are enthusiastically engaged by stories he has designed a model that highlights the power of the story form itself and employs that power in teaching. In his studies he describes some elements of stories like the binary opposites (good/bad; brave/cowardy; truth/lie; peace/violence) which are present in nearly all fairy tales and are powerful tools for acquiring, organizing and categorizing complex forms of knowledge. He considers these elements vital since they allow kids understand fairy tales in which animals and innanimate beings talk although through their experience they know that is not real, as well as to prove the significant power those tales have on children very early in life in all cultures with no time.

VLADIMIR PROPP
This Russian linguistic was born on 17 April, 1895, in St. Petersburg.
Between 1914 and 1918 Propp studied Russian and German philology at St. Petersburg State University and was a faculty member of the Department of Russian Literature until his death in 1970.
After collecting hundred of stories from oral tradition in his country, Propp analysed the deep structure of those tales and identified certain patterns and recurrig roles that represented the imagination of the popular culture. In addition, he found out a series of functions which appeared in the construction of the characters and settings of the narratives.
He published those findings in 1928 in his Morphology of the Folk Tales where he extended the Russian Formalist apprach to the study of the the basic components of Russian folk stories.
Propp argued that folk tales were born of popular imagination and developed over generations in different communities.
He also wrote The Historical Roots of Fairy Tales (1946), Russian Heroic Epics (1958) and Russian Agrarian Feast-days (1963).
He was recognized as one of the inventors of structuralism. His successors, Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas, spred Propp's taxonomy to look for the narrative elements in the whole contemporary culture.
Propp identified different types of characters and kinds of actions in a hundred traditional Russian folk tales and was able to arrive at the conclusion that there were thirty-one generic functions and seven sorts of heroes who appeared like archetypes common for all fairy tales. Although these constant elements were not present in every story, he discovered that all the narratives he analysed, displayed the functions in a unvarying sequence. He highlighted five categories of elements that define the tale as a whole:

• Functions as dramatis personae (character roles of the fairy tale)
• Conjunctive elements (announcement of misfortune).
• Motivations (reasons and aims)
• Forms of appearance of the dramatis personae.
• Attributive elements or accessories.

The thirty-one elements Vladimir Propp pointed out are the following :

1. ABSENTATION: a member of the family abandons the home environment for some reason.
2. PROHIBITION: the hero is warmed against something.
3. TRANSGRESSION: the prohibition is violated because the hero ignores the interdiction and goes ahead.
4. RECONNAISSANCE: the hero and the villain come into contact for first time. The villain makes an attempt at searching for something valuable or trying to catch someone.
5. DELIVERY: the villain receives information about the victim.
6. TRICKERY: the villain tries to gain confidence of his victim.
7. COMPLICITY: the hero acts in a way that helps the villain without knowing it.
8. VILLIANY and LACK: the villain causes some harm to one member of the family or a member lacks something.
9. MEDIATION: misfortune is made known by the hero who also discovers the villain's performance.
10. COUNTER-ACTION: the hero makes the most important decision to provoke a turning point in the story.
11. DEPARTURE: the hero leaves home.
12. TEST: the donor tests the hero to prepare him for the reception of magic support.
13. REACTION OF THE HERO: he fails the test.
14. GIFT: the hero is given a magical object.
15. TRIP: the hero is transferred to another kingdom to search for an object.
16. STRUGGLE: the hero and the villain face off in direct combat.
17. BRAND: the hero is wounded.
18. VICTORY: the hero defeats the villain or the latter is killed while sleeping/in combat or banished.
19. AMENDMENT: misfortune is resolved.
20. RETURN: the hero comes back home.
21. PERSECUTION: the hero is pursued or someone tries to kill him.
22. HELP: the hero is rescued and saved from pursuit.
23. UNRECOGNIZED hero arrives home.
24. FALSE HERO presents and claims achievements that are not founded.
25. DEFFAULT TASK: a difficult and complex mission is given to the hero.
26. COMPLIANCE: the hero successes when carrying out the difficult mission.
27. RECOGNITION: the hero is recognized as such.
28. UNMASKING: the false hero is exposed.
29. TRANSFIGURATION: the hero changes his look.
30. PUNISHMENT: the villain is punished.
31. WEDDING TRIUMPHANT: the hero rescues the princess, marries her and is given the throne.

BRUNO BETTELHEIM

BRUNO BETTELHEIM ( a Jewish philosopher who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1930).
Between 1938 and 1939 he was in two concentration camps in Austria and he was released before the Second World War took place. After that, he immigrated as a refugee to the United States in 1939. Some months later he became an American citizen.
After his days in the concentration camps, he published an article in which he described the dynamics there. Despite the fact that many people knew about the cruelty suffered by the prisoners in such places, up to that moment nobody had ever talked about that so openly. When the Second World War finished and Auschwitz became famous for the large number of Jewish killed there, everybody got to know that his words hadn’t been in vain.
As a Director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a home that treated emotionally disturbed children, Bettelheim became known especially for his work with autistic children. He made changes and set up an appropriate caring environment for a new therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults .
In The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, Bettelheim supported the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism in which, he said that this illness had an emotional origin rather than a neurological condition. He claimed that autism was caused by the emotional frigidity of the children’s mothers who were cold and distant, and the lack of stimuli during the first years of life, when language and motor skills developed. Consequently, many mothers of these children suffered from blame and guilt because of the belief that autism resulted from their inadequate parenting. In contrast, Bettelheim assured that a child would internalize the care and love experienced during his childhood only if he was treated with loving care. This attitude of the parents would help a child build up his self-esteem, and the child, in turn, would wish to care and protect himself and his own body.
Most of his work was influenced by his dreadful experience in the concentration camps and he also related autistic children to conditions in those camps. Bettelheim used the poem Togesfuge (the English version, Death fugue)written by Paul Celan (1) about the death camps, with its famous description of "black milk", and compared his terrible experience there with the carelessness of a mother towards her child and her unconscious desire of death. He said that when one was forced to drink black milk from sunrise to sunset, whether in the camps of Nazi Germany or while lying in a luxury cradle, if there was a deep unconscious death wish, in either situation, a living soul had death for a master.
In his writings in which he covered a wide range of topics, he insisted on the idea of feeling guilty because he managed to survive in the concentration camps.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Bettelheim analysed fairy tales in terms of Freudian pychology: he believed that traditional fairy tales, with the darkeness of abandonment, rivalry, witches and death, allowed a child to wrestle with his fears. If he could read and interpret these stories in his own way, Bettleheim suggested, he would have a greater sense of meaning. This author thought that if a child managed to developed a strong ego when very young, he would be able to face difficult situations more easily when grown up by engaging with these socially evolved stories. In addition, he would be better prepared for his future experiences.

On top of that, this psychologist described how the child's imagination was served by romantic stories, especially the ones that foster the child's developing mind. As well as, Bettelheim highlighted the important collaboration of parent and child in sharing fairy tales to improve the child's developing sensibilities.

Not only did a kid need those skills, but also a moral education communicated and taught through fairy tales.

He also discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including the ones considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim suffered from depression and in 1990 he committed suicide.


References:
Bruno Bettelheim From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim. Autism World available at www.autism-world.com/index.php/2007/03/20/bruno-bettelheim/
In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim available at www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9706/articles/finn.html -
(1) Paul Celan Romanian poet (1920-1970) who was also a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp in Poland and committed suicide after being liberated.

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May 25th

May 27th

IMPORTANT NAMES IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

Hans Christian Andersen
The Ugly Duckling, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Little Mermaid are some of the most famous tales created by the Danish writer and poet Hans Christian Andersen, who was born on 2nd April,1805, in the slums of Odense, Denmark. Son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman, as a child he received little education and suffered all kinds of humiliations because of his tallness and effeminate interests. When he was fourteen he moved to Copenhagen where he began a career as an actor, singer and dancer at the Royal Theatre.
In 1822 he published his first story The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave.
He loved travelling and he managed to do so throughout Europe. The result was a number of successful travel books he wrote while meeting different cultures, including: A Walking Tour from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of the Amager (1829); Shadow Pictures (1831); Life in Denmark (1836) and Pictures of Sweden (1851). During his journeys he met Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens, to whom he dedicated A Poet's Day Dreams (1853).
In 1827 his poem The Dying Child was published in the Copenhagen Post. The Mulatto and Love at St. Nicholas'Tower were some of Andersen's plays performed at the Royal Theatre.
In 1835 his first novel The Improvisatore appeared; it was autobiographical and used Italy as the setting. Two years later other novels were published: O.T. and Only a Fiddler.
Since 1835 onwards his Fairy Tales and Stories placed Andersen at the top of Literature for Children. He wrote more than one hundred and fifty stories of this type, written in colloquial style. At the beginning he retold those ones he had learnt as a child, but later on he created his own tales, which in fact have been addressed for both, children and adults, passed through generations and are still being told and adapted by other writers, dramatists and artists. Actually only twelve of his 152 stories drew on folktales. Thumbelina, The Snow Queen, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Princess and the Pea, The Red Shoes, Little Claus and Big Claus, among others appeared in Tales Told for Children, a collection of books published in every Chritsmas during those years.
In 1846 Andersen wrote The True Story of My Life and the same year he was given the Knighthood of the Red Eagle by the King of Prussia and in 1867 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Odense.
In 1855 the author of The Ugly Duckling wrote his memoirs in The Fairy Tales of My Life. On the 4th August, 1875 Andersen died in Copenhagen at the age of seventy, and his stories still live on.

The Brothers Grimm

If it were not for these two German writers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, best- known as the Brothers Grimm, many of us wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the classic fairy tales, since they would have been lost in time.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) were born in Hanau, in the city of Hessen, near Frankfurt. They belonged to a working family and spent their early childhood in the countryside, and between 1790 and 1796 they lived near the magistrates’ house, since their father, Philip Wilhelm, a lawyer and court official, worked for Prince of Hessen.
They had one sister and six more brothers, three of whom died very young. Their father also died in 1797, so that the Grimm Family had to move into an urban residence and lived there during two years.
When in 1808, their mother, Dorothea Grimm, died at the age of fifty-two, Jacob began working as a librarian and Wilhelm as a secretary.
They both attended classes at the University of Marburg to become lawyers. While studying, these two writers started to research and collect folk tales originated centuries before and that had only been passed down by word of mouth. Their main aim was to preserve such material as a valuable part of German culture and history.
In their resource they included a collection of some of the most famous fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow white and the Seven Drawfs and Rumpelstiltskin. In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm published their first book called Children’s and Household Tales, which included more than eighty stories. On top of that, in the following volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, seventy more folktales, and continued up to reach six more editions with two hundred stories.
In 1825 Wilhelm Grimm married Henriette Dorothea, but throughout their lives the two brothers were very closed to each other and they went on living together.
Both brothers worked in the University of Gottingen, but in 1837 they were dismissed because they protested against a constitutional violation of the King Ernest August I of Hannover. However, they were offered to take a new position as professors at the University of Berlin where they worked from 1842 to 1852. In the meantime, Jacob became member of the Parliament of Frankfurt. After that time, they decided to abandon their work there and dedicated fully to their studies and writings.
They became specialized in the German language and also wrote German Mythology, Old German Tales and The History of the German Language. Apart from their books, they also published a German historical dictionary, the Deutsches Worterbook, which was finally completed by other authors in 1954.
In 1859 Wilhelm died at the age of seventy-three and four years later his brother Jacob also died when he was seventy-eight.
Many of their fairy tales have become popular among children all over the world and most of us still enjoy those stories full of imagination and have been translated into more than one-hundred and fifty languages.

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault is a famous writer widely well-known as he started a new literary genre, the Fairy Tale. His most famous stories had a folk starting point and even today are in print and have been made into movies, plays and operas.
Perrault was born in Paris on 12 January 1628. His twin brother Claude was one of the architects of the Louvre Museum. They belonged to a wealthy family which allowed them study at the best schools.
In 1643 Charles started to study law, but some years later, in 1654 he began to work in the government service. He took part in the opening of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Painting, too. His first book Troya’s Walls appeared in 1661, and two years later, when the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Letters was founded, he became secretary and server under Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister to King Louis XIV. During that time he began to write poems, discourses, odes and other kinds of writings highly enjoyed by princes and the king himself.
Among his most famous tales we find:
Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, My Thumb, Donkey skin, Patient Griselda, The Ridiculous Wishes, Diamonds and Toads and Ricky of the Tuft.
These tales have managed to survive in time and became favourite literature for kids since they are full of magic and imagination. The characters in the tales are princesses, witches, ogres, fairies, talking animals and charming princes. Moreover, in every story there is always a moral teaching and a happy end.
At the age of twenty-four Charles married Marie Guichon who died in 1678 during the labor of their daughter. The couple also had three more sons.
In 1687 Charles wrote The Century of Louis the Great and between 1688 and 1692, Parallel between Ancients and Moderns.
In 1995, when he lost his job as secretary, at the age of sixty-seven, his career gave a turning point and he began to write for children. He published Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, with the subtitle Tales of Mother Goose. This book, which appeared under the name of one of his sons, Pierre Perrault, founded the beginning of the fairy tale as a new literary genre. In the folktales the author used different images he found around him and contrasted them with other ones from the world of fashion.
This author died in Paris in 1703 when he was seventy-five.