PERSON
Gillian Judson
Canadian educational theorist, Egan's close collaborator, co-director of the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Fraser University, and the principal living advocate extending Egan's framework into the AI age.
Gillian Judson is the thinker most responsible for carrying Egan's framework into the AI era. As co-director of the Imaginative Education Research Group and author of the Walking Curriculum and multiple books on imaginative education, she has translated Egan's theoretical framework into practical pedagogy while explicitly connecting his cognitive-tools framework to the emerging literature on 'robot-proof' education. Her 2019 argument — that imagination in Egan's specific developmental sense is the capacity machines cannot replicate and education must cultivate — reframed Egan's life work as the framework the AI moment most urgently needs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Judson's work spans practical pedagogy and theoretical extension of Egan's framework. The Walking Curriculum (2018) integrates place-based learning with Egan's cognitive tools, demonstrating how walking attentively through one's own environment can develop each kind of understanding. Her book Engaging Imagination in Online Learning (2020) addresses how digital tools can support rather than undermine imaginative education.
Her 2019 intervention on robot-proof education made explicit what Egan's