This week we focused on the sense of imagination. I designed an activity that gave children the opportunity to use their imagination as a form of civic engagement. At a park close to their school – Gage Park – a play structure is being taken down and rebuilt. The city of Hamilton developed programming to engage children in this remodelling by asking for their input in the form of 2 workshops and a survey. I decided to start my own data collection to platform children’s voices.

I took a picture of the current park, printed it, and brought it to my school. Before diving into the activity of imagining what type of park they would want there, I started with a warm-up exercise for them to visit their imagination. I had everyone close their eyes and imagine various things. I asked if they could see what they were thinking and many said that they could. I asked where they could see it and someone said, “inside their mind.”

After the activity I gave the children a printed picture of the Gage Park play structure. I let the kids know that the City of Hamilton is rebuilding this structure and that the City wants to know what amenities children want at the park. I gave the kids markers to draw and bring their imagination to this place.

One child, the oldest of the group, was disengaged while we were doing the imagination warm-up. He refused to close his eyes to participate. When asked to share what he had seen in his imagination, he also refused. However, when he learned that he could possibly shape the outcome of the park with his ideas, he became engaged in designing features of the park.

The group of children superimposed many fantastical things such as UFOs; winding slides; waterslides, towering play structures reaching far past the trees; a pen with food and water for homeless doggies, a pen of trained puppies that jump through hoops of fire; and vending machines that distribute shoes, dumplings, and stuffed animals; and a machine that distributes soccer balls for the park.

They also imagined things from other parks such as ziplines, rock-climbing walls, “spinny things,” trampolines, and pools with lifeguards.

A couple of children decided to circle things on the picture that they didn’t like or circle things they wanted to keep. One child expressed that he liked this play structure and that he would be sad to see it go.

I noticed that combining imagination with civic engagement motivated the children. This was demonstrated by the boy who did not want to participate until he learned that he might be able to shape the outcome of a real park.

Not only did the kids express interest in designing the park, but they also co-constructed the activity I planned to fit their ideas. For example, some children circled things at the park that they wanted to keep. Many circled elements of the play structure such as the slide and the climbing feature. One girl explained “I circled a person because I want to keep people at the park.”

One common element that multiple children imagined in their park was an amenity that ensured public access to food, water, and toys. One girl imagined a vending machine that distributes dumplings and squishy toys. One boy imagined a vending machine that distributes food and water for 25 cents. Another imagined a machine that holds soccer balls and footballs at the park for free and also designed it so that kids could reload it with the balls once they are done playing. In my interpretation, these imagined possibilities for the park suggest that children are naming the importance of sharing resources and amenities. This is an idea that some adults do not subscribe to due to cynicism and seeing people as “selfish” and as “taking advantage” of universally accessible resources. For example, from an adult vantage point, some might say that the machine that distributes balls would never work because people would just keep the balls for themselves. Maybe the question is not whether or not this is true, the question becomes why is this true and what is the role of the public park in promoting prosocial actions? Perhaps we are inclined to believe honour systems do not work precisely because there is an absence in public amenities that promote stewardship of our environment. If we take these children’s imaginings seriously, we see an aspirational blueprint for civic life. By foregrounding relational values in their designs, children ask policy makers to imagine amenities in public space as a site with potential to promote fairness and the consideration of others through relational systems built on an “honour system.” In this way, children mobilize their imagination to design systems which suggest that public amenities can be an active agent in shaping people into caretakers of our environments and of each other.

Kids also responded well to the opportunity to share their ideas with others. I interviewed each of them and wrote down their explanation of what they created. The kids excitedly lined up for this process. One child was very proud when I was able to write out a whole page of his explanation. This shows me that the act of recording his idea was empowering to him. Perhaps this is because many adults are proficient in writing and children see adults use writing to communicate with one another. Writing down kids’ ideas could communicate that we value their ideas just as we value adults’ ideas. To me, the children’s excitement towards sharing their imaginings demonstrates the importance of pedagogy that not only