Releasing the Imagination by Maxine Greene

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Releasing the Imaginationby Maxine Greene

• Hilliary Candler EDUC 440
• Marissa Sexton Dr. Hamm

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Maxine Greene
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
"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
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The Book
A collection of Essays on Education, the Arts,
and Social Change.
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Seeking Contexts

• In many respects, teaching and learning are
  matters of breaking through barriersof
  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)

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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 childrens
  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)

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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)

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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)

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• 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)

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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
  others 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)

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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)

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso
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• 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)

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• I am reminded of Paul Cezannes 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)

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• Art offers life it offers hope it offers the
  prospect of discovery it offers light (133)