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The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: 'I Am…Not Yet'

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The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: 'I Am…Not Yet' The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene Dedication: For Maxine Greene Note: All royalties from this collection go to Center for the Arts, Social Imagination, and Education founded by Maxine Greene at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: ‘I Am…Not Yet’ Edited by William F.Pinar UK Falmer Press, 1 Gunpowder Square, London, EC4A 3DE USA Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 © William F.Pinar 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 1998 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-98072-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0 7507 0812 3 cased ISBN 0 7507 0878 6 paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request Cover design by Caroline Archer Cover printed in Great Britain by Flexiprint Ltd., Lancing, East Sussex. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. Contents Introduction 1 William F.Pinar 1 An Autobiographical Remembrance 8 Maxine Greene Section One Four Books 2 ‘And he pretended to be a stranger to them…’ Maxine Greene and Teacher 13 as Stranger Alan A.Block 3 Views across the Expanse: Maxine Greene’s Landscapes of Learning 29 Anne E.Pautz 4 The Dialectic of Freedom 38 Jon Davies 5 Releasing the Imagination and the 1990s 45 Patrick Slattery and David M.Dees Section Two Themes 6 The Passion of the Possible: Maxine Greene, Democratic Community, and 59 Education Jesse Goodman and Julie Teel 7 From Both Sides of the Looking Glass: Visions of Imagination, the Arts, 76 and Possibility Carol S.Jeffers 8 Confinement, Connection and Women Who Dare: Maxine Greene’s 81 Shifting Landscapes of Teaching Mary-Ellen Jacobs 9 Signifying Self: Re-presentations of the Double-consciousness in the Work 89 of Maxine Greene Denise M.Taliaferro 10 Maxine Greene and the Project of ‘Making the Strange Liberty of Creation 98 Possible’ Paula M.Salvio vi Section Three Influences on Greene's Thought 11 Existential and Phenomenological Influences on Maxine Greene 122 Marla Morris 12 Maxine Greene: Literary Influences 135 Thomas Barone 13 The Slow Fuse of Aesthetic Practice 146 Rebecca Luce-Kapler 14 What Are the Arts For? Maxine Greene, the Studio and Performing Arts, 159 and Education Donald Blumenfeld-Jones 15 Maxine Greene: The Literary Imagination and the Sources of a Public 173 Education James M.Giarelli Section Four Greene's Influence on Educational Theory 16 A Situated Philosopher 179 Wendy Kohli 17 Maxine Greene and the Current/Future Democratization of Curriculum 189 Studies James G.Henderson, Janice Hutchison, and Charlene Newman 18 Of Friends and Journeys: Maxine Greene and English Education 212 Robert J.Graham 19 Maxine Greene and Arts Education 221 Susan W.Stinson 20 Maxine Greene: A Religious Educator’s Religious Educator 229 Kathleen O’Gorman 21 Feeling the Teacher: A Phenomenological Reflection on Maxine Greene’s 237 Pedagogy Nancy Lesko 22 Thinking about Thinking: Maxine Greene on Cognition 245 Brent Davis and Dennis J.Sumara Section Five Conclusion Towards Beginnings 253 Maxine Greene vii Notes on Contributors 255 Index 259 Introduction William F.Pinar The last time I saw Maxine was Thursday 27 June 1996. That morning she spoke at LSU (not for the first time), to an overflow crowd packed into the old Hill Memorial Library. She had been invited to speak about her ‘present passions.’ What were they, as she faced her 80th year? ‘I ask myself,’ she seemed to confide to us, as if there were two not one hundred people in the room, ‘what is the meaning of what I have done?’ Surveying the current scene, she is, she says, somber. In a time characterized by the continued deterioration of the nation’s schools, the degradation of the public sphere generally, when the progressive project itself seems a memory. ‘What,’ she asked herself, looking at us, ‘has my work meant?’ There was no hint of self-pity: only the feeling-filled, engaged voice of a serious intellectual. It was then clear to us that morning, listening to her, that the past does not hold her attention for long. It is the future that draws her, the future that calls to her. She is rewriting, she tells us, her first book, The Public School and the Private Vision (and asked me not to include discussion of the original version in this book). She continues a rigorous schedule of public speeches and professional obligations, including teaching. It is late morning now, and she has been speaking for an hour. As she draws near to what feels like the end of the speech, she pauses and looks at us. ‘Who am I?’ she poses, partly to us, partly to herself. She answers: ‘I am who I am not yet.’ ‘Not yet’…the phrase still hangs in the air around me. Maxine Greene is¼not yet. Her own sense of incompletion, of what is not yet but can be, inspires us to work for a future we can only imagine now. You will see that inspiration at work in the essays collected here. The intimacy of our relationship to Maxine—an intimacy shared of course by others who have heard and read her—will be evident in these essays also. To introduce them I want to say something about Maxine in a more public sense. Yes, she is a distinguished philosopher of education, probably the most important of her generation. Her work is very widely known, her name—along with Paulo Freire’s—among the most recognized worldwide by those interested in education. She is a former president of the American Research Association, the first woman so honored in 31 years. Within philosophy of education (see Kohli, 1995) she has triumphed despite ‘paradigm wars’ and gender trials. Her victories there and at Teachers College have not always come automatically. But this is not an occasion to speak to the internal history of her career. I hope to contribute to our reflection upon her public accomplishment by going outside the field of education for a moment. I note first of all that she is an intellectual, a serious intellectual; it was to this fact I spoke in the Ayers/Miller collection (Pinar, 1998). In this volume I wish to suggest a related characterization, still as intellectual, but more specifically as a New York public intellectual. To do that, I will speak a bit about Susan Sontag, one of the most important and accomplished public intellectuals in the New York tradition. 2 INTRODUCTION There are risks, of course: the two figures are quite different in many respects. There are, however, certain resonances between aspects of Sontag’s work—particularly her sense of herself as a public intellectual—and Greene’s. My aim is not to make a comparative argument, but rather to help us see Maxine Greene more vividly, outside our private feelings for her, by focusing on Susan Sontag. Because Maxine Greene is unique —no one can copy her singular, virtuoso interweaving of philosophy, literature, and social theory—we lack a suitable context from within the field of education to characterize her, to appreciate her, to grasp her achievement. I want the juxtaposition to point directly at that final element, as Greene’s achievement is great. Susan Sontag Like Maxine Greene, Susan Sontag arrived on the New York intellectual scene in the early 1960s. It was the end-time for a certain form of American intellectual culture and the figure—what has been termed the public intellectual—it supported. Sontag’s early essays, collected in Against Interpretation (1966a), argued on behalf of avant-garde tastes, criticized what she took to be the parochialism of American arts and criticism, and demanded a new intellectual agenda. Calling for a ‘new sensibility,’ Sontag seemed to express and even lead much of what would later be dismissed as ‘the Sixties.’ In the 1960s, Sontag achieved a media exposure hitherto rare in American intellectual life. In a decade of rapid cultural shifts as well as political, gender, and racial radicalization, Susan Sontag assumed an iconic significance (Kennedy, 1995). Stanley Aronowitz (1982) declared that Sontag ‘has become the major American example of the Critic as Star’ (p. 13). While her reputation is no longer that of the avant-garde radical, the aura of the enfant terrible remains, as she remains ‘one of the last of a kind, and no less a legend’ (Kennedy, 1995, p. 2). The intellectual role Sontag has often self-consciously performed is that of the generalist or ‘writer-intellectual’ (Beyer, 1980, p. 43). Her studies of thought and culture—wide-ranging, marked by changing personal taste and interest—include essays on historical events, ‘camp’, science-fiction, pornographic literature, photography, fascist aesthetics, cancer, and AIDS. She has explicitly endorsed the generalist figure of the intellectual, acknowledging both Americans (Paul Goodman and Harold Rosenberg) and Europeans (Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes) as models. Introducing the 1966 American edition of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, she was discussing herself as well as Barthes when she wrote: ‘Only if the ideal of criticism is enlarged to take in a wide variety of discourse, both theoretical and descriptive, about culture, language and contemporary consciousness, can Barthes plausibly be called a critic’ (Sontag, 1966b, p.
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