Jigsaws with Missing Pieces: Research Imagination(s) and Children’s Lives

Abstract

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines imagination as: ‘the action of imagining, or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses’, ‘the mental consideration of actions or events not yet in existence’. To imagine is to: ‘form an idea or notion with regard to something not known with certainty’. Imagination is, therefore, a creative resource through which we can get to know about the world: it allows us to envisage more clearly that which, as yet, we can only half grasp or understand.