Rebecca Lofton
Exploring a Curriculum Theorist
EDCT 585
October 20, 2010
A Curriculum of Possibilities: The Contributions of Maxine Greene
Additional criteria that I have found interesting, crucial to my analysis and included in this paper:1. Maxine Greene’s contribution to feminist thought and philosophy
2. Maxine Greene’s commitment to, and contributions on behalf of the arts in education
I am drawn to Maxine Greene; I am intrigued by her posture as a seeker of the connections between imagination, the arts and the continuing pursuit of social justice. I, too, believe that learning is more alive when it combines a variety of levels and cognitions. As a champion of the “mmultiple voices silenced over the years” and of “making them part of the ongoing conversation that distinguishes our culture”(Hancock) she supports an inclusive, reconceptualist idea of education that embraces all students, without exception. Her theories of society, opportunity, consensus, freedom, and responsibilitywork together to offer a different image of what can be and strive to include divergent voices into the cultural dialogue.
About Maxine Greene -
"I was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, almost always with a desire to cross the bridge and live in the real world... beyond and free from what was thought of as the ordinary" (2001). Born the first of five girls to a Hungarian mother and German father just before the United States entry into WWI (December 23, 1917), Maxine Greene came of age during the interwar years. From an early age, Maxine realized that she was different than her sisters. By some accounts not as attractive as her younger sisters, she was an object of pity and shame as her sisters were surrounded by beaux. She, however, chose to surround herself with books and writings. As young as seven, she was constantly writing in journals as a “way to communicate with her father” (Pinar, p. 8), who she adored. She developed a close relationship with her father, enjoyed his encouragement and spent countless hours discussing many things outside the realm of female-specific topics. Years later, upon reflection, Greene questioned whether her father felt more comfortable encouraging a daughter from whom there would be no competition; no matter how much he encouraged her, there were limits to what a woman could accomplish during those early years (Hancock).
When her parents entertained, Greenewas not interested in sitting in the parlor with the women, discussing charge accounts, clothes, shoes and children; rather, she would surreptitiously join the men to listen and learn from their conversations of the public and the important (Hancock).
Greene’s father was conflicted over his Jewishness and felt shame and embarrassment with any ostentatious or outward signs of their religion. He would be disgusted by signs that advertised ‘kosher’ products and strove to assimilate and become part of the larger mass of humanity. He named his synthetic pearl company, Richelieu, in an effort to move away from his roots. Greene felt stifled in this environment and in an effort to escape the confines of her middle class, Jewish upbringing and her family’s discouragement of intellectual adventure and risk (Palmer, p. 113), she spent much time at the Brooklyn museum. She craved experiencesthat she believed could only be found in the real world and surrounded herself with a community of acquaintances who were the antithesis of her own family (Pinar, p. 8). The opera, Sunday concerts at the Brooklyn Museum Sculpture Court and outdoor summer concerts were her ‘secret garden’, her way of breaking through.
The gender and religious based constraints that she experienced from childhood into adulthood gave shape to her philosophies of existentialism and responsibility for oneself amidst a shared world. Her early education included noteworthy accomplishments as Berkeley Episcopal High School student, where the Principal told her, “It is a shame that you are Jewish because I could get you a scholarship to Mt. Holyoke” (Hancock), and a major in History and a minor in Philosophy from Barnard College, Columbia University where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. After marriage, childbirth, divorce and remarriage, Greene made the decision to attend graduate school, but only those classes that she could attend while her daughter was in school. Fortuitously, the only classes that met her criteria were in the education department and a lifelong commitment to the philosophy of education was begun. After earning her M.A. (1949) and PhD. (1955) in the (predominantly male) Philosophy of Education, she accepted her first teaching job at Montclair State College where she was the only woman in the faculty, and as a Jewish woman, not allowed entry into the dining club. Deciding that it was not a place to put down roots, she left Montclair and in 1965, joined the faculty of the Teachers College, Columbia University (Palmer, p. 113).
Since that time, Greene founded and is the Director of the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has served as the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education from 1975 to 1998, and is now Professor Emeritus. Additionally, she has served as the Director of Teachers College-Lincoln Center Project in the Arts and Humanities: "Philosopher in Residence," Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education beginning in 1976. And most noteworthy, she was the first female President of the American Educational Research Association.
Greene has written numerous books, including Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy in the Modern Age(Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973), which was awarded the 1974 Delta Gamma Kappa Award for Educational Book of the Year, and too many forwards, prefaces, articles, and essays to count. She has been an editor of a variety of volumes on the philosophy of education, as well as curriculum, arts education, social justice, literature, multiculturalism and is the recipient of nine honorary degrees from universities across the country including twice recognized as ‘Teacher of the Year’ by Phi Delta Kappa (Palmer, p. 114).
Recognized by so many as one of the most important educational philosophers of our time, she has been instrumental in a revisioning of what education means, and can be, through a synthesis of personal freedom, responsibility, existentialism, feminism and freedom of imagination.
The Greene Philosophy –
Recognized by so many as one of the most important educational philosophers of our time, Maxine Green has been instrumental in a revisioning of what education means, and can be, through a synthesis of personal freedom and social justice, responsibility, existentialismand imagination and the arts.
Greene has joined her voice with the postmodern critiques of the American devotion to individualism and personal identity, instead supporting the notion that community is strengthened and made possible when individuals become “mindful of their own perspectives in contrast to others and to the validity of multiple constructions of reality” (Palmer, p. 116).
Freedom shows itself or comes into being when individuals come together in a particular way, when they are authentically present to one another (without masks, pretences, badges of office), when they have a project they can mutually pursue. (Green, 1998, p.16-17).
We are conditioned to believe that freedom is the absence of constraint or obligation, rather than a more positive sense of freedom as possibility, as the capacity for choice and creativity, as an opportunity to discover new ways of looking at things to resist knowledge that is too easily given and received (Palmer, p. 116). One of the assignments given by Green to her graduate students requires a visit to a local museum where the student selects 10 works of art which they must view, consider, and then respond to. The assignment was intentionally vague and also asked that they students chose works by an artist with which they were unfamiliar. The assignment was frightening in its open-ended vagueness, yet required the students to move from a place of comfort to one where knowledge was not easily given and received. The result was one of inner awakening and the opportunity to recognize that what is “behind the eye is so much more important than what is in front of it” (excerpt from personal interview with Dr. Jayne DeLawter, 10/16/2010). From a classroom perspective, Green believes that “a teacher in search of his or her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young people to go in search of their own” (Ayers & Miller, 1998, p. 75).
Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibility, however. One can only be free when one accepts responsibility for his/her experience of the world. While the teacher must be present to help students realize their deep connection to and responsibility for not only their own individual experience but also for other human beings who share this world, it is important for students to understand that the reason for learning is to nurture their intellectual talents for the construction of our society into a more democratic, just and caring place to live. In Releasing the Imagination, Green reminds us that it is “important that we insist on what we know through our own situation…” (Greene,1995, p. 60). In a rapidly changing world, more and more people are finding that ways they have coped with unease and disorder in the past are fast becoming inadequate. The desire or “need to constitute meanings” requires teachers to move away from the traditional sender receiver model and encourage students to accept responsibility for their education. “Most of us know enough to recognize that the young are not empty vessels but centers of energy in search of meaning. The point is to address them as persons in crisis and to do so as teachers in process, a quest, imagining what we might be” (Hancock). The teacher must be passionate and engaged in prompting students to take initiatives and act mindfully (Greene, 1973, p. 141).
Green reminds us that existentialists begin and end with the individual and with his subjectivity (Greene, 1973, p. 255). Active learning (today a cliché) as an example of the application of existentialism is best understood through the experience of engaging with art. The student sees the work of art and makes meaning for him/herself from what they see (Hancock). At the heart of the learning is the student’s experiences with the object, the way the student questions and translates the components into his/her own words. The student makes meaning through the relation to the world and that meaning represents the student’s engagement with the object. Further, we help the student create themselves by encouraging them to go beyond what the artist created at they attempt to bring something of their own into being.
Through her own personal experience as a woman and as a Jew, Green understands the importance of opening up opportunities and eliminating biases based on gender, religion or cultural/ethnic origin. Denied entry to clubs because of her gender or her religion throughout her professional career gave Greene reason to think that perhaps it was her, and not the established organizations that were wrong. She did consider, when having to rush home because the sitter did not show or her child was sick, that perhaps her husband should assume responsibility, or that the institutions where she worked owed their female employees the same consideration as their males. As she matured and developed her view of the world around her, she came to see that discrimination and oppression are harmful and barriers to equality must be torn down. Imagination is a means to help us construct a world where those barriers can be overcome. Greene states that “imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible” (1995, p. 3). When we are able to cross those spaces and experience empathy with others, “we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears” (1995, p. 3). “Of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions.” (1995, p. 3)
Imagination and the capacity to see things as they might be, to envision alternatives to the way things are – is fundamental to meaningful educational and social reform (Greene, 2009, p. 156). When we create classrooms and communities that value multiple perspectives, democratic pluralism, life narratives, and ongoing social change, we open up possibilities for learning and experiences that are meaningful and engaging. This is best accomplished through literary, artistic and phenomenological experiences that release the imagination. The artist creates his work, framing his experience in the medium which he works. The receiver who encounters the work must recreate it as it relates to his consciousness in order to penetrate it, to experience it existentially and empathetically.” (Greene, 2009, p. 156) “It is hard for me to conceive of a better argument for the relevance of the arts in schools-if it is indeed the case, as so many people believe, that boredom and a sense of futility are among the worst obstacles to learning (Greene, 1995, p. 149-150). The use of the arts in school would foster a sense of oneness with the world because the realities to which the arts give rise emerge through acts of communication (Greene, 1995, p. 150). The arts have the power to transform, to spark imagination, to open doors and to imbue students with a sense of meaning in their lives. Greene speaks of ‘wide-awakeness’ as a state of being, the opposite of numbness (Hancock). Stimulating a student’s imagination with the arts can provide experiential opportunities to see the world from multiple perspectives, helping them “wake up” by experiencing empathy with others.
Greene’s Impact on the Arts and Work with the Lincoln Center
As the founder and president of the Maxine Greene Foundation for Social Imagination, the Arts and Education, Greene has created a space for “inquiry, imagination, and the creation of art works by diverse people. It has to do so with a sense of the deficiencies in our world and a desire to repair, wherever possible. Justice, equality, freedom–these are as important to us as the arts, and we believe they can infuse each other, perhaps making some difference at a troubled time" (Greene, The Maxine Greene Foundation). Sunday Salons, where lively discussions of current literature are held in Greene’s home and broadcast, via satellite, an online community that supports teachers, artists and others interested in the mission of the Foundation and makes a library of Greene’s works available, and grants that recognize excellence in arts education and help keep the education alive are all supported by the Foundation.
Green also is the philosopher-in-residence at TheLincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. The institute grew out of a fourteen-year history of an evolving educational program, an intensive study of arts institutions and young people, and the deliberations of many artists and educators working with the organization (Noppe-Brandon & Holzer, p. 1). Initially begun in 1960, the focus of the Institute was on students; however, concerns that the program lacked education depth and the ability to reach a larger population of students caused the Center to rethink its direction. By 1970, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the Education Director at the time began the process of revamping the focus, seeking to shift towards a partnership with teachers, school leaders, community leaders, and artists who would develop educational programs for students in their own organizations. Theoretically, more students would be reached and to this day, the design of Lincoln Center Institute reflects that policy shift (Noppe-Brandon & Holzer, p. 2). In 1975, the Institute entered into a partnership with Teachers College, Columbia University, with the expectation that one of the faculty would serve as liaison with the institute. Greene was appointed by the college president, Lawrence Cremin. Within a year, a series of workshops and lectures provided by Greene dealing with the philosophy of arts in education became an integral part of the institute that has continued for over 30 years.
Some of the Strengths and Weaknesses –
Clearly, given the overwhelming honors and requests for acknowledgements in the form of a preface or forward, Greene’s ideas have wide appeal with academics and scholars. Her ideas resonate with those in the education field who chafe at the constraints of No Child Left Behind legislation. The list of revered educators who recognize Greene as an important and influential educational philosopher is long and includes William Ayers (Retired Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago), James Giarelli (Chair, Department of Education, Rutgers University), Nancy Lesko (Professor of Education, TC Columbia University),Sonia Nieto (Professor Emerita Language and Literature, University of Massachusetts), and William F. Pinar (Curriculum Theorist, Research Chair, University of British Columbia). Their writings and teachings have been strongly influenced by Greene (which in turn, influences their students), as evidence by their contributions to The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: I Am…Not Yet”, edited by William F. Pinar.