Starting with Vygotsky's research and the decisive contribution of the ensuing cultural-historical tradition (Smolucha & Smolucha, 1992; Gajdamaschko, 2005) the use of the term "imagination" in psychological and educational research has changed radically. From an irrational, egocentric and unrealistic type of thinking (Piaget, 1962), the term has come to denote a sophisticated form of intelligence in which logic is integrated with emotions and cognitive flexibility (Abraham, 2020).

Moreover, recent research in cognitive science and developmental psychology, even outside the cultural-historical tradition, has provided further empirical confirmation to support this critical rethinking of classical Piagetian ideas about imagination. This psychological function has proved indeed crucial for personal development and meaningful learning at different levels. It supports and enriches personal meaning-making and knowledge construction (Kind & Kung, 2016; Root-Bernstein, 2013). It is required for the proper functioning of emotional intelligence, empathy and theory of mind (Goldstein & Winner, 2012). It enhances metacognition and self-regulation processes (Goldstein & Lerner, 2017) and is an essential component of creative idea generation (Russ, 2014), divergent thinking and hypothetical and counterfactual reasoning (Harris, 2021).

Imaginative Education (IE) is an educational theory that unfolds the consequences of this post-Piagetian perspective on imagination in the field of curriculum design, teacher education and teacher professional development. The theory clarifies in a systematic way the reasons why imagination is a crucial resource for teaching and learning. On this basis, it also provides teachers with a set of “cognitive tools crystallized in culture” (Egan, 1997) with which to enhance the imaginative potential of teachers and learners and relate it to the acquisition of curricular knowledge and skills.

However, despite addressing several focal issues in the contemporary debate on teacher education and professional development, in its two decades of global dissemination and application, IE has yet to be analyzed and tested in the European context.

This work is part of a larger doctoral project that aims at the following objectives:

-clarify the relevance of IE in relation to the main issues addressed in the contemporary debate on teacher education and professional development, such as the development of complex thinking and creative agency informed by critical and responsible reflection on the nature and purposes of education  (Biesta, 2017);

-document and analyze IE-based teacher training programs that have been developed internationally for more than two decades;

-develop a prototype of an IE-based teacher training program to be implemented in the Italian context, taking current practices in Canadian universities in British Columbia as a model (University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Capilano University);

-conducting an exploratory case study with a group of in-service teachers to analyze the critical issues of this implementation process.

This study is the initial part of a wider research project that aims at the creation and evaluation of training programs for students and teachers based on the theory of Imaginative Education, and their implementation in the Faculty of Education of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano. The hypothesis is that this process will result in a significant enrichment of the University's educational programs and catalyze its integration with other educational institutions in the region. Concurrently, we aim to support the dissemination and the development of Imaginative Education within the European context, to enrich the debate in the fields of curriculum design, teacher education and teacher professional deveolpment.

The research design consists of three main phases. The first two took place in Canadian universities in British Columbia, where IE has been systematically applied in teacher education and professional development for more than two decades. The third will be completed in a primary school in the province of Bolzano (South Tyrol, Italy). In the first phase, IE courses for teachers have been observed and documented. o achieve this, different sources of documentation were related: desk research within university archives and databases concerning the history of IE training programs; field notes (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 2011) within participatory observations (Mukherjee, 2002) as a visiting student in current Master Programs about IE. The second phase focused on the elaboration of the course to be implemented in Italy. This phase was not limited to a theoretical investigation of the pedagogical principles of IE, but was developed through collaborative interaction with IE theorists and practitioners. An initial round of narrative interviews (Küsters, 2022) was conducted with 20 participants, 5 teacher educators, 12 teachers, and 3 school leaders, to delve into the history of IE in British Columbia and to gather different perspectives on this philosophy of education and its implementation. Next, the collected material was subjected to a process of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012) to highlight recurring themes (e.g., management difficulties, relevant pedagogical principles) that were relevant to the design of a course suitable for the Italian context. Finally, the elements highlighted were used as guidelines to develop a draft course proposal, and focus groups were conducted to receive further feedback from participants (Barbour, 2018). Finally, a case study was conducted within the methodological paradigm of Action Research for educational change (Eliot, 1991), and specifically according to its version focused on teacher professional development known in Italy as "Ricerca-Formazione" (Aquini, 2018). The study has been conducted with a group of 15 primary school teachers from South Tyrol. In this context, data have been collected through semi structured interviews and video-recorded focus groups, and thematic analysis processes have been carried out to highlight critical issues that have emerged in the course implementation. This work presents the results obtained up to the summer of 2023. The Italian case study will then proceed with a second phase, from September to December 2023, in which the course will interact with the educational planning of the teachers in the first part of the school year 2023-2024.

At the time this proposal is submitted, only the first and second phases of the research have come to a conclusion. The implementation of the course in Italy, and the analysis of the results that emerged in this phase, will take place during the spring of 2023. The structure of the three-year master's programs of Canadian universities does not find a counterpart in the training programs offered by the University of Bolzano. Among the main theoretical cores of the masters on IE (hermeneutics and dialogic pedagogy, socio-cultural psychology, action research in the classroom, lesson planning), the aspects on the practical implementation of theory for curriculum design emerged as the most relevant for a basic introduction of theory in the available time and in a context in which it is unknown. IE requires a large space for personal creativity in the planning of the courses, which made it necessary to examine the individual interviews and observations not only in the light of the common pedagogical principles but also in relation to their personal interpretation by the participants, which we have tried to reconstruct by dialogically involving them in the same critical reflection on the data analyzed. The main structural elements that emerged are: "reflection in and on practice" (Chodakowski, Egan, Judson & Stewart, 2010) which finds a theoretical counterpart in the European context in the notion of “reflective practitioner” (Schön, 1993) used in teacher training and professional development; “communities of practice” (Wenger, 2009) whose application in educational research is also widely documented in Italy. On these bases, we then worked on the construction of a course based on a constant dialogic interplay between examples/experiences/memories of IE and non IE class activities, and theoretical analyses in the form of personal in-classroom observation, collective readings, and group discussions.

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