Imagination: Childhood & Education w/ Dr. Paul Harris

In this episode, we look into how our imagination develops over the course of our lives, starting as children. This includes thinking through how education influences our imaginative capacity. Our guest scholar in this episode is Dr. Paul Harris, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard University.

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Dr. Paul Harris is interested in the early development of cognition, emotion, and imagination. After studying psychology at the University of Sussex and the University of Oxford, he taught at the University of Lancaster, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the London School of Economics. In 1980, he moved to Oxford where he became a professor of developmental psychology and fellow of St John's College.

During the 1980s, his research focused primarily on children’s understanding of mental states, including emotion. The findings were gathered together in a book published in 1989, Children and Emotion (translated into seven European languages) as well as two edited volumes (Developing Theories of Mind and Children’s Understanding of Emotion). In the 1990s, he studied the development of pretend play and imagination, culminating in a book, The Work of the Imagination, published in 2000 and an edited volume (Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific and Religious thinking in Children). In 2001, he migrated to Harvard University, where he holds the Victor S. Thomas Professorship of Education

Currently, he is studying how far children rely on their own first-hand observation or, alternatively, trust what other people tell them—especially when they try to understand a domain of knowledge in which first-hand observation is difficult. His latest book, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others, synthesizes a broad range of findings on this topic. It has received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association and the Cognitive Development Society Book Award.

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While his full catalog of articles and books is far too long to list here, the publications below provide a useful introduction to his scholarship addressing the topic of imagination:

Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Blackwell Publishing.

Harris, P. L. (2022). Children's imagination. Cambridge University Press.

Harris, P. L. (2021). Early constraints on the imagination: The realism of young children. Child Development, 92(2), 466-483.

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The Social Science for Public Good Podcast is a project of the ⁠Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance⁠ and ⁠VT Publishing⁠ intended to make social science theories accessible and available to individuals and organizations seeking to promote social change.

Music: purple-planet.com