Primary school students who contributed to a research project in Queensland, Australia, did just that, using their critical imaginations to consider how schooling could be different. These children appeared to be instinctively aware of the kind of creative approach to teaching and learning that John Dewey advanced almost 100 years ago and to which educators in general are only now paying more than lip-service. They also applied massive amounts of fantasy, creative imagination and empathic imagination. Imagination, then, is a fundamental aspect of the emancipative principles of critical theory and its application to research and pedagogy. Essentially, critical imagination is a coming to awareness of external influences that constrain and enable agency. Imagination is also present in the concept of 'distanciation', developed by Habermas and described as a "defamiliarization or reflective distance from existing traditions, thus initiating a process of 'critique', and intracommunity debate that leads to a revision of traditional meanings".