The imaginative function in student learning: Theory and case study data from third year neuroscience

Abstract

This paper combines critique of learning theory and case study data from two third-year Neuroscience students. The results and conclusions show how higher education learning research can be developed by focusing on students’ changing locution of their study-subjects. A shift from the cognitive perspectives of assimilation learning theory, towards
visualising dialogue is described and used to foreground the ways that the cognitive and dialogic “positions” construe learning differently. The analysis shows that theories and methods addressing language use provide richer learning data and a more explanatory account of understanding in an academic context. The data provide empirical evidence for the function of imagination in learning. They also illustrate two different ways in which the re-patterning of text leads to insight. The data of the first case study is ostensibly formal, comprising creativity in a continuous semiotic extension as the student shifts from one mode of representation (writing) to another (drawing). Here, however, the locution of the subject rarely goes “beyondthe-
given” of the pre-existing discourse. The work of the second student is more conspicuously inter-textual, involving the active postponement of commitments to form, as multiple texts and text-types are read in
their relations. This depends on reading and re-writing each separate lecture or paper from a growing apprehension of the perspectives of yet another (lecture or paper). Thus the student’s academic subject is
eventually re-patterned originally in an inter-animation of all these texts together: an imaginative process that includes awareness of the context of text (i.e. the relativized positions of particular authors), as well as
affective relationship towards the subject and its speakers. The discussion focuses on academic reading/writing as a simultaneous process of dialogue and design and a view of the imaginative function is developed that is relevant to science education, as much as to
literary criticism. The implications for university teaching are considered and some suggestions are made for future research.