Development of children's creative visual imagination: a theoretical model and enhancement programmes

This paper presents a new theoretical model of creative imagination and its applications in early education. The model sees creative imagination as composed of three interrelated components: vividness of images, their originality, and the level of transformation of imageries. We explore the theoretical and practical consequences of this new model. At the theoretical level, we argue that it is important to analyse creative visual imagination as both a process (understood as a cognitive mechanism) and typologically (revealing different types of creative imagination). On a practical level, we present preliminary applications and discuss several creativity training programmes for developing children's creative imagination understood as the effective and coordinated cooperation between vividness, originality, and transformative ability of images.