Education Commons^™

Educating Politicians As Playwrights: Toward A Sustainable World In Creative Conflict, Daniel Larner

Journal of Educational Controversy

If drama is the art of making the unseen visible, it is also the art of getting into the skin of another. This fundamental act of immersion and suspended judgment forms an extraordinary opportunity for teaching the power of point of view, examining contrary arguments about an issue, examining personal assumptions and boundaries, and illustrating what it takes to create and maintain justice and democracy. This paper tries to show how educating politicians as playwrights could help create the conditions for a democratic, sustainable polity to emerge.

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Prologue To Art, Social Imagination And Action, Maxine Greene

Journal of Educational Controversy

I wish to express my appreciation to Lorraine Kasprisin and all those responsible for giving me the undeserved privilege of having an issue of this unique and significant journal named after me. As some of you know, I am committed to the notion of the incomplete. Like the narrator of Moby Dick (Melville, 1851), I am convinced that the finest achievements of human beings have been left incomplete. His book in process, he said, should be considered but "the draft of a draft." And then--"God keep me from finishing anything."

Can Literature Really Make A Difference? Toward A Chastened View Of The Role Of Fiction In Democratic Education, Trent Davis

Journal of Educational Controversy

The role of literature in democratic education has always been a subject of paramount importance to Maxine Greene. Sprinkled throughout her work are thoughtful accounts of the myriad ways that the reading of fiction can significantly contribute to an understanding of what it means to teach and learn. She has continually insisted that thoughtful engagements with poetry and prose can offer new perspectives from which to see, and thereby potentially remake, the world. Even while insisting that the embracing of complexity and possibility is central to such an aesthetic reading practice, she has never wavered in her deeply felt conviction …

Art, Social Imagination And Democratic Education: Maxine Greene And The Unfinished Conversation, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Welcome to this very special issue dedicated to the life and work of Maxine Greene, philosopher, social critic, humanist, lover of the arts, existentialist, educator and a very special person in my life. When I studied for my Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University, during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, I had the privilege of studying with Maxine. Actually there were three philosophers at Columbia at that time – all coming from a different perspective. Maxine gifted me an existentialist and aesthetic perspective; Jonas Soltis helped hone in my analytical skills during the …

Teaching A “Racist And Outdated Text”: A Journey Into My Own Heart Of Darkness, Melody Wong

Journal of Educational Controversy

In wrestling with her teaching of Joseph Conrad’s frequently challenged novella, Heart of Darkness, a high school English teacher discovers her own complicity with and complacency about Western political, economic, and social hegemony. Ultimately, her research into the historical, social, and political contexts of the 19^th century novella enable her to understand its immediate relevance to the privileged world that she and her students live in, and to take her students on a personal journey in the modern “heart of darkness.”

Opening Minds: Aesthetic Engagement In The Language Arts, Jane S. Townsend, Patrick A. Ryan

Journal of Educational Controversy

We are concerned with possibility, with opening windows on alternative realities, with moving through doorways into spaces some of us have never seen before. We are interested in releasing diverse persons from confinement to the actual, particularly confinement to the world of techniques and skill training, to fixed categories and measurable competencies. We are interested in breakthroughs and new beginnings, in the kind of wide-awakeness that allows for wonder and unease and questioning and the pursuit of what is not yet (Greene, 2001, p. 44).

Supporting Maxine Greene’s call “to awaken” our perceptions through art, we, as English teacher educators, …

A Leap Of Faith: Aesthetic Education In The Mathematics Education Classroom, Edward S. Wall

Journal of Educational Controversy

We speak only for having been called, called by what there is to say, and yet we learn and hear what there is to say only in speech itself. Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004, p. 1)

For the past four years I have hosted Lincoln Center Teaching Artists in a graduate mathematics education course I teach for elementary school teachers and elementary school pre-service teachers. I find the hosting experience enjoyable and informative and my impression, gained from comments and short written reflections, is that many of my students find it likewise. Simultaneously, I believe in the pragmatic worth of this experience. …

Of Rocks And Hard Places—The Challenge Of Maxine Greene’S Mystification In Teacher Education, P. L. Thomas

Journal of Educational Controversy

Recently, a colleague talked with me about a field observation she had conducted the day before, an observation that left her between a rock and a hard place. The teacher candidate performed a flawless lesson—well planned, well implemented with students eagerly and fully engaged. As we talked about the observation, my colleague and I agreed that most people (professional educators and laypersons) observing the lesson would be at least satisfied if not thrilled with the beginning teacher’s work because the primary traditional parameters for assessing a teacher’s work include efficiency and structure.

Tilting The Machine: A Critique Of One Teacher’S Attempts At Using Art Forms To Create Postformal, Democratic Learning Environments, Tricia M. Kress

Journal of Educational Controversy

Ten years ago, shortly after being admitted to a graduate English program at a public college in New York City, I was also offered my first academic teaching position. The head of the English department hired me as an adjunct to teach 100-level writing courses. Looking back, I equate that moment in my life with being shot up into the metaphorical pinball machine that is public education. Let me explain.

Coming Into Presence: The Unfolding Of A Moment, Lynn Fels

Journal of Educational Controversy

We are always, always being swept along in a moment of becoming. Let us for once hold such a moment, brimming again with precious fragile life. (Dragland, 2008)

My husband teaches science in a junior high school (grades 8-10) and, every year, he co-directs a musical with his students. In a school of ninety students, sixty eager teenagers sign up for auditions. He and the English teacher assign roles for three casts because, as he insists, “anyone who shows up should be allowed to participate.” This practice of communal inclusion stems from his own experience of early disappointment in …

Lunch At Petra: Greene, Gargoyles And The Sixth-Grade Field Trip, Kathryn Lafever

Journal of Educational Controversy

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through,” said Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. xv). I am inclined to agree, murmuring those words like a prayer as I drive my two young sons to elementary school through a treacherous predawn snow. Through the darkness, I am enmeshed in morning rush-hour traffic as a hypnotizing snow pounds the windshield, completely obscuring the view between swipes. The Inuit have about a hundred words to describe different kinds of snow; I might call this type snow day or anticipate a wreck snow. Miles back, I tested the road …

Refusing The Gift? Curriculum, Pedagogy And Early School Leaving In Ireland, Rose Malone

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper explores students’ resistance to schooling and attempts to identify some of the factors contributing to that resistance and the efficacy of attempts to overcome it. It draws on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to locate that resistance within the habitus of the student concerned. The concept of habitus is analysed below, but the paper is founded on the premise that habitus cannot be fully described in quantitative terms and that an effort of social imagination is required to interact with it. The device chosen here for this work is that of metaphor. The paper estimates the value of a metaphor …

Children's Imaginative Communities - Microcosms Of Democracy, Susan Donnelly

Journal of Educational Controversy

A few years ago I was invited to be part of a community focus group to discuss education in our local county. This conversation was part of a broader effort to develop a blueprint for future community development, and it involved other focus groups representing diverse perspectives. In our group there were several district superintendents, a school board member and a university representative. I was there as the head of a small independent school. Near the end of the conversation, we were asked what we would like the broader community to know about our field and what it contributes to …

Maxine Greene: Influences On The Life And Work Of A Dynamic Educator, Karen L. Goldman

Journal of Educational Controversy

Passionate leader, visionary, esteemed educator are qualities synonymous with Maxine Greene. Her influence as a dynamic educator leads 21^st century educational reform. Greene’s prolific writings inspire passion in others. In a 2002 article entitled, “The Power of One,” Amy Oringel names Maxine Greene among teaching’s most revered thinkers. She is one of the hardest working teachers that this profession has ever spawned. While teaching courses in aesthetic education – the process of building students’ cognition by exposure to the arts – to thousands of students, Maxine Greene has impacted the next generation of teaching professionals. She is an active …

A Response To A New Book About Maxine Greene’S Philosophy, David T. Hansen

Journal of Educational Controversy

Maxine Greene’s work comes to vibrant life in a new book written by John Baldacchino. The book is entitled Education Beyond Education: Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy (Lang, 2008). Baldacchino is a professor of Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is both a practitioner of fine art and an insightful philosophical critic of art and its relation to education. His career-long commitment to thinking with care about these matters nicely positioned him to undertake an inquiry into the offering to our fellow human beings that Greene has been putting forth for several decades.

Working With Youth: In Search Of The Natality Of The Teacher, Chris Higgins

Journal of Educational Controversy

In teacher education, what one says about teaching is probably less important than how one addresses teachers. One of the things that make Maxine Greene's work singular and singularly important is her mode of address as a teacher educator. In her classes and her writings alike, she never forgets that she is speaking to teachers, and that in doing so she is speaking to human beings. This is not to say that others address teachers in an inhuman way. It is simply to point out that Greene reaches out to teachers, again and again, as fellow inhabitants of a set …

A Greene Imaginary, Michelle Fine

Journal of Educational Controversy

Maxine has just blown out the candles on her 90^th birthday cake. With expected brilliance, she speaks to an adoring crowd, surrounding by swelling applause. And then, characteristically, she whispers to me: “Was that okay?” This is Maxine’s signature ending to a speech.

Notes On A Blue Guitar, William F. Pinar

Journal of Educational Controversy

Aesthetic education is … integral to any educational enterprise. -- Maxine Greene (2001, p. 139)

For twenty years Maxine Greene delivered lectures at the Lincoln Institute for the Arts in Education. They are collected in Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001). Working from these, I sound notes of my own, variations on Greene’s conception of aesthetic education. As indicated in the epigraph, that conception extends to education generally. Understanding art (whether as performance or object) as event and as simultaneously continuous and disjunctive with everyday experience, Greene envisions aesthetic education as engendering subjective and social reconstruction.

"One Aneither": A Joycean Critique Of Educational Research, Ray Mcdermott, Meghan Mcdermott

Journal of Educational Controversy

A few years ago, the two of us attended a Maxine Greene lecture at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She told an inspiring story about an articulate teenager from the Bronx critiquing the ups and downs of respect, status, and the coming of age and rage in the metropolis. The teenager's words, she said, reminded her of Walt Whitman, and she read two lines from his Leaves of Grass to make her point. We had with us a copy of her wonderful first book, The Public School and the Private Vision (1965), an intellectual history …

To Maxine Greene On Her 90th Birthday, James M. Giarelli

Journal of Educational Controversy

I couldn’t help beginning this paean to Maxine Greene on her 90^th birthday without thinking of John Dewey’s 90^th birthday on October 20, 1949. There were a couple of festschrift volumes growing out of conferences at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, letters from scholars, artists, activists, and public figures, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and much public notice and tribute. A lot of nice things were said about Dewey and science, reflective thinking, social planning, the great community, and other ideas central to his storied career. In 1949, it seemed the Anglo-American imperium was in triumph, the …

Shaking Them Up: Aesthetics In Social Foundations Of Education, Mary Bushnell Greiner

Journal of Educational Controversy

“How are we going to shake them up?” This is the question Maxine asked me as she and I planned a summer course for K-12 teachers as part of Summer Session 2007 at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. It’s a variation on the questions that permeate all of my conversations with Maxine: How can we understand another’s experience? How do we move out of complacency? How do we enact and live transformations? How do we move away from prefabricated images and meanings to joyously birthing our own selves through our interactions with art and ideas? How …

Variations On A Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures On Aesthetic Education By Maxine Greene, Rosalie Romano

Journal of Educational Controversy

In Variations on a Blue Guitar, a collection of lectures to teachers presented at Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, philosopher of education Maxine Greene addresses classroom teachers’ practice, their questions, and their thinking about teaching and learning for aesthetic education. This text is a philosophical call to bring the arts into the classroom, deepening the experiences and animating a sense of self that connects a particular kind of engagement. Greene argues that “Aesthetic education …is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is …

For Maxine Greene: The Teacher’S Responsibility, The Flesh, And Aesthetic Meaning, Jim Palermo

Journal of Educational Controversy

To me, Maxine Greene is a friend, a muse, and the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the moral teacher. My tribute to her shows a convergence with the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s construct of the flesh. Specifically, Mme. Greene’s work emphasizes the teacher’s moral responsibility to the student. A recurring imperative is that the student be caught up in a heightened consciousness, engaged with others, and wide awake to personal possibilities. But she also argues that the student may see the teacher as The Other. Sartre (1948) defined The Other as one who is dominated and subservient to another. De Beauvoir (1949) …

Community In The Making: Lincoln Center Institute, The Arts And Teacher Education (The Series On School Reform) By Maxine Greene (Foreword), Madeleine Fuchs Holzer (Editor), Scott Noppe-Brandon (Editor), Matthew Miller

Journal of Educational Controversy

Over her years of service to the education community, Maxine Greene has given us a greater understanding of how perceptive encounters with the arts can enliven our democracy and awaken and move people to see, to hear, to feel, and to engage in their world in often unexpected and productive ways. The essays in Community in the Making: Lincoln Center Institute, the Arts, and Teacher Education describe how, over the course of ten years, eight colleges and universities of teacher education embraced Greene’s philosophy of aesthetic education and designed rich partnerships with teaching artists from the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) …

The Dialectic Of Freedom By Maxine Greene, Anne Blanchard

Journal of Educational Controversy

Maxine Greene pushes against common conceptions of what it means to be free. By exploring how various individuals and groups struggled to identify, confront, and transcend the obstacles that limited their agency, Greene shows us that resistance to oppression is essential to the pursuit of human freedom. Reflection and action upon conditions that constrain us is an “existential project” directed at achieving freedom, and as such it is “a central life task” (p. 67). Informed by philosophy, history, art and literature, Greene explores how freedom-seeking women, immigrants, minorities, and other oppressed groups have moved from private to public domains in …

Releasing The Imagination: Essays On Education, The Arts, And Social Change By Maxine Greene, Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon

Journal of Educational Controversy

How does imagination help us as inquirers? Assuming the value of imagination for inquiry, what should teachers and schools do to help encourage and further develop students' imaginative abilities? These are two questions I have been considering lately, and I have found two excellent sources to help me. I want to share them with you, the reader, first on an individual basis (as they are each worthy of their own review), then together to highlight their common bonds. Mary Catherine Bateson uses Peripheral Visions as an opportunity to reflect on her life and some of the key experiences she had …

The Professions And Scholarly Communities: Creating The Public’S Questions And Understandings In The Public Square, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy looks at the ways the professions and the scholarly communities shape the public’s understandings and questions. Bringing expertise and professional norms to the public square is fraught with tensions and dilemmas. Sometimes these tensions arise because professional expertise comes into conflict with the democratic will. Other times, conflicts emerge within the communities of scholars and professions themselves when new paradigms challenge traditional ones.

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Journal of Educational Controversy

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Privacy And Library Records, A Case Study In Whatcom County, Joan Airoldi, Daniel Larner

Journal of Educational Controversy

The events discussed in this article by Whatcom County Library System director Joan Airoldi, describe the stand taken by Airoldi and her board of directors, defying a request, then a subpoena, for the name of a patron who checked out a particular book. This exemplary display of personal courage connects Airoldi and her colleagues to those who stood up against the Palmer raids of 1919, the Red Scare of the 1930’s, the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950’s, the COINTEL program of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the illegal wiretaps conducted after September 11, 2001, and the successful passage of the …

Outsiders/Within And In/Outsiders: Varieties Of Multiculturalism, Mary F. Rogers, Kathy Mckibben Hoover

Journal of Educational Controversy

In this paper we look at outsiders/within, a pivotal concept in not only women’s studies, but also in racial/ethnic studies and the social sciences, especially sociology. After showing how problematic this modernist notion tends to be, we theoretically complicate it. Thereafter, we show how once theoretically embellished, some version of this concept offers a foundation for a postmodernist multiculturalism that is necessarily and inclusively feminist.