RELEASING THE IMAGINATION BY MAXINE GREENE Hilliary CandlerEDUC 440 Marissa SextonDr. Hamm

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.“ maxinegreen.org Maxine received her doctorate in education from New York University in 1955 and went on to teach at New York University, Montclair State College and Brooklyn College. Maxinegreene.org

The Book A collection of Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change.

Seeking Contexts  “In many respects, teaching and learning are matters of breaking through barriers—of education, of boredom, of predefinition.” (14)  We, as teachers, have to be “concerned with action, not behavior” (15).  “For this passion is the doorway for imagination; here is the possibility of looking at things as if they could be otherwise.” (16)

Imagination, Breakthroughs, and the Unexpected  Teacher goals: “Transformations, openings, possibilities” (17)  National goals:  All children must be prepared when they enter school  Graduation rates from high schools will be 90 percent  All Americans will become literate  The teaching force should be well educated  Parents should be more involved in children’s learning  “to learn and to teach, one must have an awareness of leaving something behind while reaching toward something new, and this kind of awareness must be linked to imagination.” (20)

The Shapes of Childhood Recalled  “the notion of recalling the shapes of childhood with reference to a life story.” (74)  “Gender, sibling and maternal relationships, political and professional phenomena, and even aging and decline from “my self” – the shaping influences of contexts. We are influenced by what we read. We apply our own context to what we read and make our own meanings of it.” (74)

The Continuing Search for Curriculum  “How would it be possible to counter the dullness and banality of many service jobs by enabling the young to find fulfillments outside of the world of work?” (89)  What can we do to make things interesting for the students while at the same time educationing them and meeting our requirements.  “For most educators over the years, curriculum has had to do with cultural reproduction, the transmission of knowledge, and at least to some degree, the life of the mind” (89)

 “If we regard curriculum as an undertaking involving continuous interpretation and a conscious search for meanings, we come to see many connections between the grasping of a text or artwork and the grasping and the gaining of multiple perspectives by means of the disciplines” (96)

Teaching for Openings  “I would like us to discover how we can all discover together against the diversity of our backgrounds, write together, draw upon each other’s existential realities…” (119)  “We teachers will confront thousands and thousands of newcomers in the years ahead: some from the darkness and danger of the neglected ghettos, some exhausted from their suffering under dictators, some stunned by lives in refugee camps, some unabashedly in search of economic success” (120)

Art and Imagination  “When even the young confront loss and death, as most of us are bound to do today, “it is important that everything we love be summed up into something unforgettably beautiful…” (Leiris, p.201)” (122)  “To see sketch after sketch of women holding dead babies in their arms, as Picasso provoked us to do, is to become aware of a tragic deficiency in the fabric of life” (122)

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

 Would it be a good idea to further the requirements of education and implement an art SOL?  “It is my conviction that informed engagements with the several arts is the most likely mode of releasing our students’ imaginative capacity and giving it play” (125)

 “I am reminded of Paul Cezanne’s several renderings of Mont St. Victorie and of his way of suggesting that it must be viewed from several angles, from multiple perspectives if it is to be achieved as a phenomenon of consciousness” (131)  “…the significance of encounters with the arts for classrooms in which the young are moved to imagine, to extend, and to renew. Surely, nothing can be more important that finding the source of learning, not in extrinsic demand, but in human freedom.” (132)

 “Art offers life; it offers hope; it offers the prospect of discovery it offers light” (133)