Taking Flight, Standing Still: Teaching Toward Poetic and Imaginative Understanding

In this collection of recent essays and reflections, Richard Lewis shares his pursuit of teaching as a means of deepening a child's poetic and imaginative understanding. He makes clear, through examples of his own teaching and the thoughts and writings of children, how much of what each child brings with them, as they play and imagine, dream and wonder, is a necessary and profound part of our human consciousness and creativity. Throughout, he asks us to listen to the conversation each of us began in childhood, to the flight and stillness of our own imagining, to those understandings and learnings, in ourselves and in children, that continue to be the basis”the poetry”of who we are and the nature we inhabit.