|
The Maxine Greene Institute Newsletter
February 2021
Vol. 7 No. 1
Heidi Upton, Holly Fairbank, Barbara Ellmann, editors
The Mission
The Maxine Greene Institute promotes the philosophy of Maxine Greene and the practice of aesthetic education and social imagination.
The Vision
The Institute provides community activities and a virtual space for dialogue and reflection among educators, teaching artists, scholars, students, and those interested in related philosophies and practices.
In This Issue:
-
The Board Report
-
Website Library Update
-
Salon Series
-
Notes from the Field
-
Recent Events
MGI and Black Lives Matter
|
|
Board Report: Introducing New Members
Welcome to Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English Education & Racial Literacy at Teachers College, Columbia University.
A published poet, Dr. Sealey-Ruiz's research focuses on racial literacy and culturally responsive teacher education. She was a student of Maxine’s when she attended Teachers College. Her recent published work includes Love from the Vortex & Other Poems and a piece in The Brooklyn Rail.
Dr. Sealey-Ruiz was an Events Planner for 13 years for the NY Times and Business Week.
|
|
Welcome, Dr. Mark Pottinger, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Music and Theater at Manhattan College.
Dr. Pottinger is the author of a number of publications on nineteenth-century music and culture as well as the contemporary listening environment. An ardent lover of all things French, he teaches in Paris during the summers, presenting lectures at several historic venues throughout the city.
|
|
|
MGI Website Library Update
The Maxine Greene Institute Library provides a comprehensive collection of Maxine Greene’s writings, papers, speeches, articles, books and videos, many of which include links to resources and original works. Our newly refurbished and expanded collection also includes news briefings and conference updates about her life and career as well as items and references to works by other educators, writers, and students, about Dr. Greene, Aesthetic Education, and Social Imagination.
The collection is now organized in the following headings:
• Career & Life: Materials about Maxine Greene and her life. Includes biographies, tributes, and films.
• Work & Writings: Materials by Maxine Greene. Includes texts and talks.
• Influences: Works cited and referenced in Maxine Greene’s texts and talks, from John Dewey to Mary Oliver…
• Inspirations: Selected materials, both scholarly and aesthetic, that reference Maxine Greene.
• Resources: Resources and materials for further learning.
Teachers College Resources
In addition to the Maxine Greene Institute Library, Teachers College has collected a rich archive of Maxine’s correspondence, articles and reviews which can be referenced at the links below:
Teachers College Maxine Greene Archive
Teachers College Maxine Greene Collection
Many, many thanks to Alison Lehner-Quam and other members of the Board on the Library Committee including summer interns Eve Hauser and Will Sacks for a tremendous job well done!
Recent Events
Salon Series
Please join us for a series of conversations with artists, scholars, educators and others interested in the work of Maxine Greene. We will post recorded events on our website calendar every other month. We hope these Salons will provide a place for an exchange of ideas and a sharing of artworks, teaching practices related to aesthetic education, and examples of social imagination. After each installment online through the coming months we aim to continue the conversation on our website via the Conversations feature.
Our first salon in this series was a three-part conversation with storyteller, musician and poet David Gonzalez posted over the summer and fall of 2020. In each session David performs a few short stories from around the world and walks us through some aspects of the craft of storytelling including Words, Voice, Movement and Imagination and what he calls, “Technologies of Enchantment”. Joining David after the performance were education students from Holly Fairbank's aesthetic education classes at CUNY's Hunter College and the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC).
Notes from the Field
We frequently hear from fans of Maxine’s around the world and, in fact, to date MGI has 280 international subscribers from places such as Australia, Iran, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. Consequently, in 2021 MGI plans to develop an International Committee to support the interests in Dr. Greene with this particular international community.
Here is one letter from a new subscriber, Hugo Moss, in Brazil:
I only came across Dr. Greene in the early part of this year, really just by chance, and have ever since been resisting the constant danger of being frustrated at only having come across her work in my late 50's, so strongly does it all resonate with me on so many levels, including the myriad reflections on the arts and creative life in the education of the young.
Almost everything Dr. Greene writes that I have come across so far brings into such clarity so much that I already believe in my heart to be true and wise and urgent, but very often I know it all with so much less clarity. So it is with deep gratitude and wonder that I have been reading and studying the wealth of ideas in "Releasing the Imagination". Imagination is the foundation of Michael Chekhov's work and indeed the creative process in general. A lot of what we base our practical work on here at the studio has to do with Goethe's imaginative connection to the natural/material world - his "exact imagination" - all of which are in perfect harmony/echo with Dr. Greene's writings.
I could write for hours about how much this all means to me, also on a personal level, having endured an English public school education where I didn't fit in at all (to my great credit I now see, but not at the time, of course). We also teach at a university (Unicamp, São Paulo State) and through this work maintain an ongoing conversation/exploration of the challenges of teaching the arts within such a formal framework. Dr. Greene has already found her way into several of our conversations with the professor who is our main interlocutor there.
So it would be hard to exaggerate how wonderful it is to have found Maxine Greene and the Institute, especially in these present times. I look forward to joining the conversations and to learning more.
Kindest regards,
Hugo
Maxine's 103rd Birthday Celebration
December 23rd, 2020 would have been Maxine’s 103rd birthday and as in birthdays past, we are asking you to consider celebrating this date with a donation to the Maxine Greene Institute, using the number 103 as inspiration for your donation. You can make your donation through our website: www.maxinegreene.org via PayPal OR send a check to The Maxine Greene Institute, 817 West End Ave. #5D, New York, NY, 10025.
May we all continue to live and work with the passion and dedication that Maxine has inspired in us!
Please click on the image to listen to and watch MGI Board Members discuss and recite some of Maxine's favorite poetry, on the MGI YouTube Channel.
Thank You!
Black Lives Matter
The Maxine Greene Institute, in its mission to pursue Dr. Greene's vision of the Social Imagination, grieves with and stands in support of the protesters on the streets of America and offer these words, Maxine’s own--a light in dark times...
Democracy, we realize, means a community that is always in the making. Marked by an emerging solidarity, a sharing of certain beliefs, and a dialogue about others, it must remain open to newcomers, those too long thrust aside…Again, it ought to be a space infused by the kind of imaginative awareness that enables those involved to imagine alternative possibilities for their own becoming and their group’s becoming.
Community cannot be produced simply through rational formulation nor through edict. Like freedom, it has to be achieved by persons offered the space in which to discover what they recognize together and appreciate in common. *
Although Maxine Greene wrote those words decades ago and, while they do not address the events of the past few months specifically, they, continue to echo with powerful resonance today.
We believe Maxine would insist upon our living with steadfast humanity and embrace not only respect, wide-awakeness, humility, and inclusion but also each other. We imagine she would urge that this fight does not end when the protests end. Instead, we recommit ourselves together and each in our own way to creating a more humane, just world. We are tasked to act against racism, to imagine "alternative possibilities" and to actively support all black lives that at this moment are yet struggling to be free.
Please join us at www.maxinegreene.org and join the space we have provided for discourse and reflection.
|
