Through the Sight of Symbolic Art. The Imaginal Research in Educational Sciences

Most diffused research attitudes in the field of education are marked by approaches, ideas, representations, that “scientific disciplines” use to analyse main themes and problems of Pedagogy. This certainly contributes to grant Pedagogy a scientific status and provides researchers and educators with clear interpretation patterns and useful educational tools, but often it limits their sensibility, forcing them to assume a rationalistic, reductive and judging attitude towards the complex educative phenomena they face. To compensate for this fashion this paper propose an “imaginal research” that is an artistic and poetical approach aiming to recognise and include imagination among comprehension procedures of Educational Sciences. Following several thinkers who promoted the revival of imaginative thought and called for “poetic reason” the imaginal approach seeks to extend its knowledge basis in a similar way to the imaginative and artistic disciplines. It is a highly reflective perspective which explores educational culture and its theoretical constructs, problems, objects and practices through the medium of collections of artistic images; Specifically, we look to the world of art to identify works with a particularly rich symbolic content; then, following a conservative respectful and nomadic hermeneutic approach in line with the procedures of symbolic-imaginary enquiry, the symbolic works of art are encountered, not so much to “illuminate” them but to understand them and to participate in the symbolic mythical tissue of them. Contemplation of these images, which are particularly rich in meaning, also promotes deeper knowledge of the phenomena under study, it reveals the various sedimentations of sense underlying them and ultimately facilitates a deeper, more detailed and shared understanding of them. This approach does not claim to uncover a single definitive meaning in experience and will not have a rapacious and greedy grip on the world but, on the contrary, turns to it, in a bewildered position, in a continuous research always open to possible interpretations and meanings. In this sense imaginal research approach has also a deep pedagogical aim that is to promote a more sensitive attitude towards symbolic dimension of the world and to enhance participants’ sense of belonging to an “animated” reality which they may consequently approach with renewed “fondness” and sense of responsibility