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Maxine Greene Institute Newsletter
Spring 2023
Vol. 9 No. 1
Editors: Barbara Ellmann, Holly Fairbank, Carole Saltz, Heidi Upton
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 First MGI International Conference 2023
Maxine Greene Institute YouTube Channel
From the Salon Series
Website Library Report/MGI Reading Group
Notes From the Field
Coming Events
First MGI International Conference 2023
The International conference, entitled “Global Perspectives: Aesthetic Education, Social Imagination and the Work of Maxine Greene” was held on January 13th and 14th, 2023 and was hosted by Holly Fairbank and Ruth Zealand over ZOOM and presented by both MGI and I-4.
Questions we set out to explore over these two days included:
- How do the practices of Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination manifest in various global communities?
- In what ways has Maxine Greene influenced and inspired scholarship, education and artist practices?
Featured sessions included a presentation by Dr. Janet Miller on Maxine’s unique approach to philosophy, a consortium of educators from Canada, another from Mexico hosted by Tere
Quintanilla and presented in Spanish, and a third from Australia hosted by Dan Harris including five scholars from around the country.
Two educators/artists from Israel, Shaked Cohen and Rei Raviv, presented the work of the Tarbut Movement, a collective that was originally inspired by Maxine’s philosophy and her book Releasing the Imagination.
Pam Burnard, a professor at The University of Cambridge in the UK and James Biddulph, principal of the University of Cambridge Primary School, introduced us to the University of Cambridge Primary School that is inspired by Releasing the Imagination. Read more about this collaboration in Notes from the Field.
In addition, Jean Taylor and Marika Crete-Reizes gave a presentation of the work being done through Place des Artes in Montreal, to train teaching artists and teachers in the practice of Aesthetic Education. Heidi Upton and Barbara Ellmann presented a video of Aesthetic Education in practice at St. John’s University in NYC. Olu Animashuan, Deirdre Hollmann and Amanda Gulla presented a conversation exploring speculative literature and alternative learning spaces.
The conference extended over the two days and included art interludes (visual arts, music, dance) as well as open conversations within break-out rooms.There were at least 80 participants attending the ZOOM conference from around the world. The event was produced by David Kraft in Bolivia.
Maxine Greene Institute YouTube Channel
The Maxine Greene YouTube Channel now includes two documentaries on Maxine (On Being Greene, Exclusions and Awakenings: The Life of Maxine Greene), events from the MGI Salon Series, and special events celebrating Maxine’s birthday.
Recently, five archival lectures (one is linked on the image to the left) given by Maxine at Lincoln Center Institute, in the 90’s, have been added to the collection. Other conversations on Maxine’s work and legacy by scholars, artists and students are available as well. Recently added are all the sessions from both days of the First International Conference 2023.
Make sure to visit our YouTube Channel for all of these exciting additions.
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From the Salon Series
This newsletter is featuring Poetry Is Possibility from our Salon Series, with Amanda Gulla and Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz and hosted by Zoey Peacock-Jones. Click on the image to the left to be taken to this Salon.
And if you want to see other videos in our Salon Series, please go HERE.
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Website Library Report
Library Update: Alison Lehner-Quam
In preparation for the international conference, Global Perspectives: Aesthetic Education and the Work of Maxine Greene, the library was updated to include selected articles, books, and creative works by the presenters. Eve Hauser, MGI Library Assistant, researched and sought out these works, indexed them, and featured them in the Library. Many can be found in the Library by searching on the speaker’s last name. https://maxinegreene.org/library
A Report on the MGI Reading Group at the International Conference
During our International Conference, January 2023, Alison Lehner-Quam led a virtual reading group focusing on a chapter of Maxine Greene's Releasing the Imagination. Participants were asked to read the chapter ahead of time, to prepare for this group experience. What follows is a report on this event.
“‘To Speak of Passions’: A Maxine Greene Reading Group”
by Alison Lehner-Quam
“To speak of passions…is to have in mind the central sphere for the operation of the passions: ‘the realm of face-to-face relationships’ (Unger, 1984, p. 107). It seems clear that the more continuous and authentic personal encounters can be, the less likely it will be that categorizing and distancing take place. People are less likely to be treated instrumentally, to be made ‘other’ by those around” (Greene, 1995, p. 155).
The Maxine Greene Institute Library Committee was pleased to host a reading group during the international conference, Global Perspectives: Aesthetic Education and the Work of Maxine Greene.The Library Committee wanted to provide an opportunity for conference participants to talk in small groups and to share their responses to a reading from one of Maxine’s books. As the Committee considered what materials to share, Committee member Carole Saltz suggested pairing a chapter from Releasing the Imagination titled “The Passions of Pluralism: Multiculturalism and the Expanding Community” with a clip from Markie Hancock’s Exclusions and Awakenings: The Life of Maxine Greene. The Committee felt that both the book and the video would be accessible to participants from around the world. Releasing the Imagination has been translated into Spanish, Hebrew, and Chinese and is available internationally in nearly one thousand libraries https://www.worldcat.org/title/45668386 and the Exclusions and Awakenings is available on the MGI YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/36wW31VaTSk
Maxine’s ideas of community developing through conversation as described in “The Passions of Pluralism” (1995) inspired what the committee hoped to have happen in the discussions: “Speaking of passions, engagements, and imagining can become a way of speaking in an expanding community that takes shape when diverse people, speaking as who and not what they are, come together in both speech and action to constitute something in common among themselves” (p. 155).
“The Passions of Pluralism” has a prominent publishing history. It first appeared in a special issue of Journal of Negro Education, a journal that was founded in 1932 at Howard University, a historically black college. That special issue was titled Conceptions of Africentrism and Multiculturalism in Education: A General Overview. Maxine’s article appears in the Theoretical Foundations section, along with an article by James A. Banks. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ article, “Liberatory Consequences of Literacy: A Case of Culturally Relevant Instruction for African American Students” was also published in the issue. The guest editor, Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, introduced the issue with an expectation for its future: “Given the limited amount of theoretical and curricular materials available in this area, this issue of the Journal might well be recognized as a major reference for serious workers in this field.” “The Passions of Pluralism” was subsequently reprinted in Educational Researcher and then as chapters in Releasing the Imagination and in Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education.
At the online conference most of the time for the reading group session was spent in self-managed breakout rooms. There were a few protocols that were shared to set the grounds for participation. These are: What is brought up in the group, stays in the group; Listen mindfully; and We'd like to give everyone who wishes to share the opportunity to do so, so be aware of the time and of opportunity for others to participate.
Participants were asked to address the following questions: Point to a specific passage that struck you and explain why; What is the central idea or premise of the passage you are offering?; In the context of Maxine’s work, what do you imagine her intention is in this passage?; How is the passage/chapter relevant today?; and Did you learn anything new from the text and or film? These were inspired by protocols and discussion prompts used in the Diversity and Inclusion discussion series at Lehman College.
Participants were encouraged to share quotations that were meaningful to them from the reading or to discuss some pre-selected quotations to prompt conversation. At the end of the breakout rooms there was a brief time to report back on ideas discussed in the groups. References were made to how adaptable Maxine’s approach to education is, for example, the idea of centering student’s whole selves in the classroom. Some participants mentioned an appreciation of ideas found in and inspired by the readings: ambiguity, activism, considerations of what constitutes taking action, and looking at indigenous practice in education.
Some quotations from the reading and transcriptions from the video were shared at the beginning of the session to support the discussion. These may be helpful to you if you wish to start your own Maxine Greene Reading Group, and are listed at the end of this article along with ways to access the readings and the video.
Resources
Ways to Access the Readings and the Video
Greene, M. (1995). The passions of pluralism: Multiculturalism and the expanding community in Releasing the Imagination (pp. 155-168). Jossey-Bass.
There are multiple ways to access the reading. You can access or check out the book or read an earlier edition of the article in a journal. There are very slight differences in these different editions of “The Passions of Pluralism.”
• In Releasing the Imagination.
o Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/releasingimagina0000gree/page/n7/mode/2up Sign up for a free account. Book can be checked out on an hourly basis.
o WorldCat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/45668386 Find the book at a library near you.
• In Educational Researcher. (1993), 22(1), 13-18.
o https://www.jstor.org/stable/1177301 Register for a free account. Read up to 100 articles for free per month.
• In Journal of Negro Education. (1992), 61(3), 250-261.
o https://www.jstor.org/stable/2295246 Register for a free account. Read up to 100 articles for free per month. Journal of Negro Education was founded by Howard University in 1932. https://jne.howard.edu/
• Hancock, M. (Director). (2001) Exclusions and awakenings: The life of Maxine Greene [Film]. University of California.
o https://youtu.be/36wW31VaTSk While you are welcome to view the entire clip, the section that we will discuss begins at 8:30 and ends at 17:39.
Quotations from The Passions of Pluralism
“There have always been newcomers in the United States; there have always been strangers. There have always been young persons in our classrooms that most teachers did not, could not, see or hear” (1995, p. 155).
“In this chapter, I speak of pluralism and multiculturalism but with concrete engagements in mind, actual and imagined; engagements with persons young and old, suffering from exclusion, powerlessness, poverty, ignorance, or boredom. I speak with imagination in mind and metaphor and art” (1995, p. 155).
“To open our experience (and, yes, our curricula) to existential possibilities of multiple kinds is to extend and deepen what each of us thinks of when he or she speaks of community” (1995, p. 161).
“[Toni] Morrison is not interested in replacing one domination by another, but she is interested in showing others what she sees from her own perspective—and in this showing, enriching all others’ understanding not only of their own culture but also of themselves” (1995, p. 161).
“My point is that we need openness and variety as well as inclusion. We need to avoid fixities, even the stereotypes linked to multiculturalism. To view a person as in some sense ‘representative’ of Asian culture (too frequently grouping together those of Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese culture in addition to ignoring each individual’s differences) or Hispanic, Afro-American, or Euro-American culture is to presume an objective reality called ‘culture,’ a homogenous and fixed presence that can be adequately represented by existing subjects” (1995, p. 164).
“Freire makes the point that every person ought, on some level, to cherish her or his culture, but that culture should never become an absolute, closing the person against the new culture surrounding him or her. When this happens, ‘you would find it hard to learn new things which, placed alongside your personal history, can be meaningful’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 126)” (1995, p. 164).
Video: Transcriptions from Exclusions and Awakenings
“When I read some of the feminist stuff now, that I knew nothing of when I was growing up. I realize now, how I looked at the world through the eyes of male writers. I read almost all men writers. For example, American literature, as most of you know, is full of men who go out in pursuit of whales or to the wilderness or to Walden. They very seldom take women with them. You know, there’s no women in Moby Dick”—Maxine Greene.
“Most of us know enough to recognize that the young are not empty vessels, but centers of energy in search of meaning. In search of some way of grasping their situation in the world and their relations to others. The point is to address them as persons in process and to do so as teachers in process. In quest, imagining what we might come to be” –Maxine Greene.
“The Brooklyn Museum near where we lived had free concerts on Sunday in the Sculpture Court. And to me that was… an enormous breakthrough, that I could go there. I sort of chose those people who went there as my community. And they weren’t like my family. I guess that was the important thing, they weren’t like my family”—Maxine Greene, about her youth.
“I guess the point I really want to make so badly is the way in which what we read or the paintings we encounter affect the way we constitute meaning, the way we create our own identity”—Maxine Greene.
Notes from the Field
In March of 2021 MGI received a text message from James Biddulph, the Principal of the University of Cambridge Primary School, to let us know that his school in Cambridge had been modeled directly on Maxine Greene’s book Releasing the Imagination. Would we like to explore a collaboration? I returned his text enthusiastically and with astonishment, grateful to have discovered such a marvel. James went on to introduce me to his mentor at University of Cambridge, Pam Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Education. What an inspired and inspiring team they make! Pam is an international expert in contemporary music and creativities research and practice. Both have been extremely moved to action by Maxine’s work. We have been in close communication ever since we met.
Cambridge University Primary School
In November of 2021 they agreed to zoom an interview with some members of our MGI Board where they described the mission, goals and curricular design of the Primary School founded 6 years ago. At its core, they explained, is the goal to develop “compassionate citizens” using the practices of Oresteian Dialogue, Playful Inquiry, and Habits of Mind and the principles spelled out in Maxine’s Releasing the Imagination”. Here is a link to the video made that day of James’ initial introduction to the school.
Subsequently, at the MGI International Conference in January of 2023, James and Pam led a session entitled: Aesthetic Education Across the U.K., from the Perspective of The University of Cambridge Primary School. Here is a link to that Session.
And to see an example of Oresteian Dialogue with kindergartners at the school, go to this link and click on the video there.
MGI is thrilled to have been awakened to this school and introduced to these two remarkable educators and innovators.
Below are some excerpts from the school’s literature describing their Centre and research goals, vision, and values for the school. The Centre, as they describe it, focuses on “inspiring social imagination”, based on Maxine’s words. At the core of the school’s values is the commitment to develop the teachers' imaginations through creativity and the arts.
Excerpt from the Primary School Brochure:
A Centre for Educational Possibilities
Our centre is set to become a hub for expanding ideas on curriculum, pedagogy and children’s agency. It will research new knowledges, skills and pedagogies to create inspiring resources for educators across the globe.
Vision and Values
We are committed to exemplary teaching and learning for children. In our approach to learning, we aim to be creative, bold, free thinking and rigorous. The academic achievement of our children will be underpinned by a commitment to values and developing compassionate citizens of the future.
The school endeavours to put into practice what matters to children and is an innovative professional learning community for educators. In seeking to provide outstanding education for the children, we are keen to develop partnerships with educators, academics and communities locally, Nationally and Internationally.
Coming Events
In the near future to support conversations initiated by the International 2023 conference, we plan to launch an On-Line Seminar Series.
These seminars will include:
• Presentations and introductions by new international subscribers
• Conversations between generations inspired by Maxine’s work and legacy
• Reading groups focusing on various articles or chapters written by Maxine
Aesthetic Education Practice and Pedagogy Models and Applications
Because of increased interest in the practice of Aesthetic Education (AE), we plan to develop pedagogical models and applications. This series will include:
• Designing a line of inquiry around a particular work of art in order to develop a lesson plan or classroom activities
• Guiding the Noticing around works of art in various disciplines
• Exploration of AE Higher Education syllabi
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