Imagination and what Vygotsky is pretty much screaming at us

Imagination is something that may be real, or may not be real. While this is a confusing and loaded statement, I could not agree with it more. Imagination is pretty much; everything. We often say that a child's imagination is "wild" and laugh at it. Why is this? Why is it that we perceive ourselves to lack vivid imaginations? Well, that's because we have accrued more everyday experiences and scientific concepts, unlike children. While a child's imagination of say a pirate might be mostly accurate, if you probe them further, there might be some things that emerge that don't seem very right. This makes us label it as a "wild imagination". Now, an adult has an active imagination that is more cohesive. It has a multitude of experiences to draw upon. This can actually create meaningless but beautiful things when one gets lost in the voluminous oceans of mental data we possess as a result of plasticity and our nerves being scarred softly and tenderly with new experiences. However, if we are careful and thoughtful in our imaginations towards using them to change our environments, the results can be pretty pronounced.

When I thought about activating imaginations in the classroom, I began to think about how we correctly assume that humans have more experience. This is where we stop being correct though. Scaffolding, which is something a lot of us do in the classroom, is something that does not allow imaginations to interact. Rather, it allows the incorporation of a particular scientific concept into the imagination in a fixed manner. However, when one engages deliberatively and internalizes new concepts as a social process rather than a "product", the ZPD is reached, and one can integrate other people's experiences into their own. This is what Vygotsky says makes up an active imagination. Integrating different perspectives into one unified perception of reality or irreality (often in the case of children) can produce results that can either be visionary, or mindless daydreaming. As we grow more mature, we become reticent to dream and imagine even though we are fully capable of having more coherent AHA moments. This is a theme that runs through a lot of Vygotsky's work I feel. He seems to be telling us we HAVE social capacity, we HAVE wonderful imaginations, and asking us why we choose to keep ourselves from using them.