Kieran Egan (philosopher)

For other people named Kieran Egan, see Kieran Egan (disambiguation).

Kieran Egan
Egan in 2004
Born	1942 (1942) Ireland
Occupation	Author, Professor of Education, Canada Research Chair in Education

Kieran Egan (born 1942) is a contemporary educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history. He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the intellectual stages (Egan calls them understandings) that occur during a person’s intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.

He currently works at Simon Fraser University. His major work is The Educated Mind.

Biography

Egan was born in 1942 in Clonmel Ireland, though he was raised and educated in England. He graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1966. He subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston upon Thames. He then moved to the United States and began a Ph.D in the philosophy of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Egan completed his Ph.D at Cornell University in 1972.

Imaginative Education

Kieran Egan is the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, which was founded by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. The goal of this group is to improve education on a global scale by developing and proliferating the ideas of Imaginative Education

Main works

• 1976 Structural Communication. Fearon Publishers, Belmont, Calif. ISBN 0-8224-6550-7
• 1979 Educational Development. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-502458-3
• 1983 Education and Psychology: Plato, Piaget, and Scientific Psychology. Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York ; London. ISBN 0-8077-2717-2
• 1988 Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90003-4
• 1988 Imagination and Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 0-8077-2878-0
• 1989 Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19031-5
• 1990 Romantic Understanding: The Development of Rationality and Imagination, Ages 8-15. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90050-6
• 1992 Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19033-1
• 1997 The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-19036-6
• 1999 Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges: Essays on Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN 0-8077-3808-5
• 2002 Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. Yale University Press, New Haven. ISBN 0-300-09433-7
• 2005 An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. ISBN 0-7879-7157-X
• 2006 Teaching Literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, Calif. ISBN 1-4129-2788-9
• 2008 The Future of Education: Reimaging Our Schools from the Ground Up. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. ISBN 978-0-300-11046-3
• 2010 Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation that Can Transform Schooling. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ISBN 978-0-226-19043-3

Awards and honors

• 1991: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education
• 1993: Elected to the Royal Society of Canada
• 2000: Elected as Foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Education (U.S.)
• 2001: Killam Research Fellowship
• 2001: Appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Education
• 2010: Utne Reader magazine listed Egan as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."

External links

• Homepage
• Egan's profile at Simon Fraser University
• A brief guide to imaginative education