Lessons of imagination
07/04/23On the 27th of March Anna was invited to give a talk for the University of Edinburgh for the STS department there, STIS. In this talk she spoke about the importance of spatial imagination in learning. Spatial imagination is an important skill to learn for novices in the field of mathematics architecture, and medicine. However, how it is cultivated in higher education is rarely discussed. The perceived “demise” of imagination in education has increasingly become a matter of concern for some, especially in the context of digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
In this seminar, Anna explored how spatial imagination is taught in the specific setting of the medical school. She discussed the physical, sensory learning that the Making Clinical Sense research team encountered in medical schools in Ghana, Hungary, and the Netherlands. She explored the practices, places, and objects used by teachers in crafting spatial imaginations and what these materials do. In her talk she showed that this type of learning opens up a different kind of knowledge compared to virtual and online educational environments.