The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: 'I am...not yet'

272 Pages·1998·1.62 MB·English

by  William Pinar

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
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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 is…not 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. xi). For Sontag, the work
of the contemporary intellectual requires this expanded concept of ‘criticism’ (Kennedy, 1995).
‘The deepest structure in the culture and ideology of intellectuals,’ Alvin Gouldner (1979) once
observed, ‘is their pride in their own autonomy’ (p. 33). Sontag exhibited such a pride as an
independent thinker and champion of critical intelligence. It is a role she sometimes imagined—as
has Edward Said (1996)—as a condition of intellectual ‘exile.’ Anticipating Said (1996), Sontag saw
the intellectual as a kind of ‘amateur’ unrestricted by disciplinary and professional allegiances. This
formulation of her intellectual self-image, Kennedy (1995) insists, is crucial to an understanding of
her work: ‘I think of myself as self-created, that’s my working illusion’ (quoted in Cott, 1979, p.
53). This longheld ‘illusion’—as Kennedy (1995, p. 4) characterizes it—is one that might have been
born during what she has described as her ‘very solitary and very bookish childhood’ (quoted in
Kennedy, 1995, p. 4). It may have to do as well with the struggles of a woman in a predominantly
male intellectual world (Kennedy, 1995).