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The Function of Imagination
in University Science
David Brian Hay
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain (1892)
INTRODUCTION
This paper concerns the function of the imagination (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 1986) in scientic research
and in science education. Michael Bakhtin’s dialogic theory—sometimes referred to as a theory
of the literary or social imagination (see Holquist 2005)—is a robust account of intertextuality
(Kristeva 1986a), whereby new insight and new imaginative understanding are seen to be produced
in the inter-animation of one and “an other” text (Wegerif 2007, 2008). In this paper, using dialogic
the