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Maxine Greene Institute Newsletter
Spring 2024
Vol. 10 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 Board Report
- International Consortium: Mexico, Ireland, Israel
- National Consortium: Advisory Group
- Website Library Update/Youtube Channel
- Notes from the Field: Jane O’Hanlon
- Recent Events
The Board Report
Each Board member has chosen to serve on one or more committees that cover the various tasks we have set for ourselves. Some volunteer to Chair their committees as well. These committees include International, National, Events, Website, Newsletter, and Library.
We meet as a Board every other month to keep all informed, discuss issues and make plans for the future. As the Maxine Greene Institute grows and expands its services to a larger and larger audience across the country and around the globe, the diligent and inspired work of our Board members keeps the work flowing without outside costs.
That said, it seems increasingly obvious that MGI will need to be more focused on fund raising to be able to hire support staff. MGI now has an Advisory Group, both National and International colleagues, who have been helping us extend the Mission of the Institute.
International Consortium: Mexico, Ireland, Israel
Ever since the MGI International Consortium Conference in 2023 MGI has kept in touch with various institutions, arts organizations, and individuals who were interested in pursuing the conversation in their communities. Currently there are robust actions developing in Mexico, Israel and Ireland.
Mexico
Tere Quintanilla, the head of IMASE in Mexico, collaborated with her colleagues, Pablo Buniak and Jimena Granados, to design a six-month study group for educators and artists in Spanish speaking countries.
In collaboration with MGI, IMASE will meet once a month with a group of 20 participants with readings and writing assignments in between sessions.
Ultimately, they hope to create a publication (in Spanish) that explores Maxine’s philosophy and writings on aesthetic education and social imagination. The initial session took place on April 9th and included participants from Spain, Peru, and Mexico.
Ireland
Jane O’Hanlon from Poetry Ireland, based in Dublin, reached out to MGI to see if we could help initiate a Symposium to include scholars, educators and artists around Ireland who are interested in Maxine’s work. After numerous Zoom meetings with Jane and her colleagues Helen O’Donoghue and Carmel Hinchion, we focused on the following questions to pursue:
• Who was Maxine Greene?
• What are her ideas of aesthetic education and social imagination?
• Why do these ideas resonate so deeply in these challenging times?
• What practices in Ireland have been influenced and inspired by Maxine Greene?
The Symposium took place on January 13th, 2024, hosted by the Poetry Ireland Team and members of MGI Board (Holly Fairbank, Heidi Upton, Amanda Gulla, and Ruth Zealond) along with 40 participants from all areas of Ireland.
Jane is now in NYC on a Fulbright Grant partially hosted by MGI, and the next Poetry Ireland/MGI Symposium is in the works! Please see profile of Jane O’Hanlon in the Notes from the Field Section below).
Israel
The Tarbut Movement in Israel have reached out to MGI to help them develop a series of seminars with university students to deepen their understanding of Maxine’s philosophy and aesthetic education. Below is an excerpt from a recent newsletter:
Finding Pedagogical Inspiration in the Works of Maxine Greene: It was only after ten years of cultural and educational activity - with children, teens and adults from all sectors and classes - that we became acquainted with Maxine Greene's writings. We found them to be a powerful expression of our intuitive thoughts that guide our actions - of the liberating force and moral role of artistic education.
We have been working with Rei Raviv, Shaked Cohen, Ofir Ben Ari and others to bring this into being this spring.
National Consortium in Development
After a successful launch of the MGI International Consortium, it seemed the obvious next step to reach out to the many people in the US who have either been committed to Maxine’s vision for years or have more recently discovered her works.
Board members Carole Saltz, Barbara Ellmann, Jean Taylor, Heidi Upton, and Holly Fairbank identified some key practitioners of AE around the country to form an Advisory Group to help guide us in this endeavor. In March we met with 13 designated professionals to hear their recommendations on ways to create a National community focused on promoting Maxine’s legacy.
The next steps include a four-part Seminar to address the following strands of interest:
1) Maxine Greene's philosophy and its application in Higher Education, to include readings and examples of syllabi
2) Divergent application to Aesthetic Education (AE) practice in various environments
3) AE in K-12, cultivating opportunities for aesthetic experiences
4) Social Imagination according to Maxine Greene and inspired practitioners.
These seminars would ideally be led by both Advisors and MGI Board members with invited participants around the country to explore these areas.
Nationally, there are numerous leaders and educators who have found ways to teach for justice and equity through the arts and have deepened the practice of aesthetic education as a result. It is our belief that by creating a network of practitioners (artists, students, academics, and researchers) and offering a platform for dialogue we can, together, enrich the community of which we are all a part.
Website Library Update
The Scholarly Conversation Continues
Maxine Greene now has her own Google Scholar profile page and her numerous scholarly contributions of books and articles are listed there. In cases where her publications are openly accessible, readers can follow the links to access Dr. Greene's work.
When you click on the title of a work by Dr. Greene on the profile page you can see the number of times it has been cited over the years. For instance, as of April 9th, 2024, Dr. Greene's book Releasing the Imagination has been cited 63 times in 2024.
For those new to Google Scholar, the "Cited by" column on the profile page provides links to those who have cited Dr. Greene's work. Clicking on the number of citations listed in this column will bring you to the works in which Dr. Greene's work has been cited. These articles and books are sorted by relevance by default. You can also sort them by date to see in which recent articles Dr. Greene has been referenced.
For those interested in keeping up with Dr. Greene's role in the scholarly conversation, you can click on the "Follow" link at the top right of the page. There you can identify the option to receive "new citations to this author" and "new articles related to this author's research." The Maxine Greene Google Scholar profile page provides another way to witness the visible impact of Dr. Greene's transformative work.
“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: Jane O'Hanlon
I have been working with Poetry Ireland’s Education and Outreach Desk for the past twenty-four years. I love it because I get to work with people – teachers, artists, librarians, arts professionals - who are passionate about the importance of arts education and aesthetic learning. They implement Maxine’s principles and approaches on a daily basis in classrooms all over the country, and believe, like Maxine, that we should ask more rather than less of the young people in our care!
My work spans the theory and practice of arts-based teaching and learning and includes the development of literature-based programmes for children and young people, particularly with the schools’ system, from elementary schools through high school. Maxine’s work, initially a life raft, became and is a go-to and a touch stone for me since I first encountered it more than15 years ago. In particular her concept of the aesthetic as ‘wideawakeness’, which she sees asdirectly countering the anesthetizing of effects of contemporary life. Maxine’s unwaveringbelief in the idea that although “The arts… cannot change the world… they may change human beings who might change the world,” has also been a fundamental driving force for me in doing this work.
We work with a dedicated - in all senses – pool of writers across all genres, which also includes storytellers and spoken word artists, who conduct short visits or longer residencies. Poetry Ireland is funded by both Arts Councils, the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Norther Ireland (ACNI).
Along with schools, we also work in collaboration with local councils, literature festivals, national cultural institutions and like-minded individuals and organizations. My work is focused on creating access for those for whom access to educational and cultural participation is more difficult or restricted.
As a Fulbright Scholar I’m spending three months working with Poet’s House, Battery Park, and the Maxine Greene Institute, New York, shadowing, learning, and exchanging ideas, approaches, and strategies to serving both the public and the poetry community. I want to create new networks, particularly at the international level, to enrich the thinking and contribute to a wider understanding and vision of and for the work that we do. I hope that together we can continue to make a strong case for arts education and the potential of aesthetic learning to enrich curricula and to support learners as they embark on their future life paths in an increasingly complex and demanding world.
Poetry Ireland is developing The Poetry Centre, at No 11 Parnell Square East, embedding, and becoming part of, the thriving and diverse community of North East Inner City of Dublin, where we welcome visitors and would love to meet you if you come to Dublin.
Recent Events: Maxine Greene and Her World
To support our thinking and discussions around the ideas of aesthetic education, social imagination and Maxine Greene’s foundational philosophical thinking in these contexts, we at MGI created a resource (a Prezi video linked on left) that has recently been shared at both Poetry Ireland and IMASE gatherings described earlier in this Newsletter.
Guernica: A Cross-Disciplinary Planning Session
Amanda Gulla and Rabab Abi-Hanna, two professors at Lehman College, recently recorded a planning session focusing on Picasso’s Guernica. Gulla teaches a graduate Education course in English Language Arts and Abi-Hanna teaches a graduate course in Math Education. The two perspectives on this famous painting highlight the wonderful ways that different lenses and ways of seeing can exemplify the power of close noticing and dialogue to create a lesson plan that honors this work of art from multiple viewpoints.
This will soon be available on the Maxine Greene Institute YouTube Channel.
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