Envisioning the threshold. Reflections for a Pedagogy of Crossing

Abstract

This paper offers a philosophical-educational reinterpretation of imagination as a form of crossing the margin. Starting from the distinction between limes and limen, imagination is understood as a genealogical, theoretical, and deontological-political category. The argument draws on psycho-pedagogical research, especially Vygotsky’s account of imagination as combinatorial activity rooted in experience; on phenomenology, particularly Costa’s analysis of its manifestative function as intertwined with feeling; and on philosophical anthropology, through Ulrich’s understanding of imagination and childhood as forms of human life marked by gratuitousness, play, and wonder. Accordingly, imagination is assumed as a theoretical category capable of going beyond the mechanisms that configure both childhoods at the margins and the margins of childhood, while outlining guiding principles for a pedagogy of crossing.