Prologue to Art, Social Imagination and Action

I wish to express my appreciation to Lorraine Kasprisin and all those responsible for giving me the undeserved privilege of having an issue of this unique and significant journal named after me. As some of you know, I am committed to the notion of the incomplete. Like the narrator of Moby Dick (Melville, 1851), I am convinced that the finest achievements of human beings have been left incomplete. His book in process, he said, should be considered but the draft of a draft. And then-- God keep me from finishing anything

From Jagged Landscapes to Possibility

Blue tents on the crushed rocks of the Pakistan mountain; the upheavals of the ocean at Sri Lanka; the stagnant brown waters in flooded New Orleans; wild fires, mine disaster: and here we all are—educators, technologists, artists, people of power, and those without power, struggling to survive. We are not the first to feel a slippage under our feet, to grope for a “point d’appui,” something to stand on, a platform, a ground. Like so many of our predecessors, many of us grope wildly for security. We seek a certainty of protection, of salvation. We want (what with our resources, our technical competencies, our capacity for control) to assert our superiority, our deserved invulnerability. Whether through a confidence in an ‘intelligent design” that favors the truly fit, or through a faith in a “higher power” that has singled out the faithful for a special providence, many of us picture ourselves in a select domain, see ourselves as the entitled ones. Those at the lower end of the bell curve, those remote from our canons, our traditions, are today’s infidels. Without knowing it, we have become ‘Social Darwinists’; and that frees us to pay little, if any attention to those lost in the freezing mountains, to the women of Darfur, to the survivors of the Rwanda massacres, to those thrust into a mass in a New Orleans astrodome

Reflection and Passion in Teaching

In the current efforts to account for the failings of American education, the searchlight of attention has been turned to the quality of teaching. The implication seems to be that teaching, among all the variables that affect colleges and schools, is most susceptible to management and repair. The themes recur in state after state: career ladders, merit pay, teacher testing, job analysis, effectiveness measures, definitions of mastery. Salary increases are made contingent on their adoption. Official interest, however, focuses on their motivational and managerial aspects; and there is a taken-for-grantedness with respect to the idea that enhanced teacher quality will increase student achievement. When taken as a literal doctrine, Israel Scheffler\u27s statement of some years ago, There can be no teaching without learning, becomes a slogan. But in times of educational inertia, he said, a slogan of that sort takes on practical import: To speak . . . of teaching as selling and of learning as buying, to suggest that teaching be compared with business methods improvable by reference to effects on the consumer, [is] to signal strikingly the intent to support reform of teaching. The buying and selling metaphor may not be used today, but clearly a very similar mode of thinking underlies current reform proposals. The insistent emphasis on achievement and the dangers we are said to face if achievement levels are not raised make the success use of to teach dominate, if not overwhelm, the intentional use of the term. Yet most practitioners still believe themselves to be teaching if they are engaged in a particular kind of deliberate, goal-oriented activity, in efforts to move others to learn to learn. Because of the persistence of reassuring slogans (those Scheffler called rallying symbols of the key ideas and attitudes of educational movements, ) the intentional dimension is being overlooked, along with many possible ways of thinking about the teaching act. It is with possible ways that I shall be concerned

Greene, Maxine, Consciousness and the Public Space: Discovering a Pedagogy, Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 3(No. 2, 1985), 69-83.

Argues for teachers to interact with the public community to pursue freedom, critical understanding, and transformation

Greene, Maxine, Curriculum and Consciousness, Teachers College Record, 73(December, 1971), 253-269. Reprinted pp. 299-320 in William F. Pinar, ed., Curriculum Theorizing. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1975. Reprinted pp. 237-253 in Arno A. Bellack and Herbert M. Kliebard, eds., Curriculum and Evaluation . Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1977.

Shows how breaking with common sense views and examining alternative ones can lead to designing curriculum with many possibilities

Greene, Maxine, Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings, Teachers College Record, 95(Winter, 1993), 211-221.*

Makes the case for inclusion of diverse perspectives, including women\u27s, in curriculum content