“Trees Don’t Sing! … Eagle Feather Has no Power!”—Be Wary of the Potential Numbing Effects of School Science

Educational philosopher Maxine Greene called for the “centrality of the arts” to education at all levels decades ago, yet the aesthetic core of education has been often negated to the margin or completely forgotten in public education. What is desperately needed in formal education is what Greene termed as “wide-awakeness” or “being attentive to the beauty and cruelty of life, to “aesthetic encounters” and “living in the world esthetically.” Reflecting on recent conversations with her three school-age children, the author draws upon multimodel narratives, including her lived curriculum in mainland China and the United States and her children’s experiences with formal education in Canada, to warn of the potential numbing effects of school science curricula and pedagogy in public education. Finally a few strategies for centering the aesthetics are proposed to hopefully immunize ourselves and students against the potential numbing effect of school science.

Autobiografia e a necessária incompletude das histórias de professores

O artigo é um convite para interrogar meu trabalho sobre autobiografia, gênero e currículo. Em diálogo com a obra de Maxine Greene, em especial com “As formas da infância relembrada”, revisito meu interesse pela autobiografia, como gênero e método, na pesquisa educacional. As questões que atraem minha atenção são os desafios que as teorias pós-estrutural, psicanalítica, pós-colonial e queer apresentam à unidade e à coerência do “eu” intacto e plenamente consciente das práticas autobiográficas ocidentais, assim como aos limites de sua representação. Argumento que a autobiografia, como uma forma de investigação educacional, seja considerada também como literatura, assumindo o potencial da literatura imaginativa de interromper, ao invés de reforçar, as versões estáticas e essencializadas de nossos “eus” e do nosso trabalho como educadores. Esse pode, a meu ver, ser o único motivo para usar a autobiografia como uma forma de investigação educacional.

Literature and the Arts as a Basis for Curriculum in the Work of Maxine Greene

Maxine Greene, internationally renowned educator, never regarded her work as situated within the field of curriculum studies per se. Rather, she consistently spoke of herself as an existential phenomenological philosopher of education working across multidisciplinary perspectives. Simultaneously, however, Greene persistently and passionately argued for all conceptions and enactments of curriculum as necessarily engaging with literature and the arts. She regarded these as vital in addressing the complexities of “curriculum” conceptualized as lived experience. Specifically, Greene regarded the arts and imaginative literature as able to enliven curriculum as lived experience, as aspects of persons’ expansive and inclusive learnings. Such learnings, for Greene, included the taking of necessary actions toward the creating of just and humane living and learning contexts for all. In particular, Greene supported her contentions via her theorizing of “social imagination” and its accompanying requisite, “wide-awakeness.” Specifically, Greene refused curriculum conceived as totally “external” to persons who daily attempt to make sense of their life worlds. In rejecting any notion of curriculum as predetermined, decontextualized subject-matter content that could be simply and easily delivered by teachers and ingested by students, she consistently threaded examples from imaginative literature as well as from all manner of the visual and performing arts throughout her voluminous scholarship. She did so in support of her pleas for versions of curriculum that involve conscious acts of choosing to work in order not only to grasp “what is,” but also to envision persons, situations, and contexts as if they could be otherwise. Greene thus unfailingly contended that literature and the arts offer multiplicities of perspectives and contexts that could invite and even move individuals to engage in these active interpretations and constructions of meanings. Greene firmly believed that these interpretations and constructions not only involve persons’ lived experiences, but also can serve to prompt questions and the taking of actions to rectify contexts, circumstances, and conditions of those whose lived lives are constrained, muted, debased, or refused. In support of such contentions, Greene pointed out that persons’ necessarily dynamic engagements with interpreting works of art involved constant questionings. Such interrogations, she argued, could enable breaking with habitual assumptions and biases that dull willingness to imagine differently, to look at the world and its deleterious circumstances as able to be enacted otherwise. Greene’s ultimate rationale for such commitments hinged on her conviction that literature and the arts can serve to not only represent what “is” but also what “might be.” As such, then, literature and the arts as lived experiences of curriculum, writ large, too can impel desires to take action to repair myriad insufficiencies and injustices that saturate too many persons’ daily lives. To augment those chosen positionings, Greene drew extensively from both her personal and academic background and interests in philosophy, history, the arts, literature, and literary criticism. Indeed, Greene’s overarching challenge to educators, throughout her prolonged and eminent career, was to think of curriculum as requiring that persons “do philosophy,” to think philosophically about what they are doing. Greene’s challenges to “do philosophy” in ways that acknowledge contingencies, complexities, and differences—especially as these multiplicities are proliferated via sustained participation with myriad versions of literature and the arts—have influenced generations of educators, students, teaching artists, curriculum theorists, teacher educators, and artists around the world.

“It Depends:” From Narration Sickness to Wide Awake Action in Music Education

In this article, we query how action is contextualized and used in music education, centering the discussion around problems of calling for change without taking action, what Paulo Freire terms “narration sickness.” Narration sickness manifests in social media, conferences, and professional development sessions—where words convey ideas as grand narratives, devoid of context, causing a division between those who present ideas from those who enact them in practice. We describe how music educators may become unintentional slacktivists, “woke” to the need for action, attempting to improve the field with limited (if any) action at all. We invite music educators to counter “wokeness” with what Maxine Greene calls being “wide awake,” offering examples of educators who demonstrate change. We seek to expand the definition of action, drawing upon what Freire and Marx term as praxis, seeking actionable approaches in teaching, researching, and learning across age levels, settings, and contexts.

Fighting the plague: “Difficult” knowledge as sirens’ song in teacher education

Of the many plagues that affect communities today, a particularly insidious one is indifference and depersonalization. This plague has been articulated by Albert Camus and then taken up in an educational context by Maxine Greene. In this article we, the authors, respond to Greene’s call to co-compose curricula with our students to fight this plague. Recognizing the role of difficult knowledge as well as conscious and unconscious defenses, we develop an approach to “diversity” harmonious with radical love during these troubled times of conflict and increased visibility of hatred. Through a weaving of our experiential, embodied knowledge with theory, we consider how we might invite students to consider contemporary, historical, and ongoing inequity and structural violence. Like Sirens luring sailors to precarious shores, we seek to entice teachers and students to the difficult knowledge they might otherwise avoid as all of us together consider our ethical responsibilities to each other.

What is Existential Educational Encounter?

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter by providing an overview of its use from the historical foundations of the concept in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903 to 1991) philosophy to contemporary phenomenological readings by Maxine Greene, Donald Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison. The outcome is a critical analysis and evaluation of the significance of the concept in educational contexts. The aims of the paper are as follows: a) to articulate the educational significance of the concept of encounter, and b) to clarify its relationship to the humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), in order to establish the tension between Bildung-theory and the existential theory of human formation. The paper claims that, for a more elaborated understanding of the human educative process, the tension between the processes of encounter and Bildung should be seen as the core tension behind the holistic view of becoming human. Also, c) for an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the concept, a phenomenological view of the encounter as a transcendental aspect of a learning process will be made in order to gain a wider view of the concept.

Aesthetics and Education

The intersection of aesthetics and education offers space to understand how the study of perception, sensuous experience, beauty, and art provide the potential for learning and human emancipation. These domains have been persistently understood as necessary to cultivate democratic societies by shaping citizens’ moral, ethical, and political sensibilities. Aesthetics is often considered a dangerous and paradoxical concept for educators because it offers the means for both political transformation as well as political manipulation through disruptive, engrossing, all-consuming aesthetic experiences. In short, aesthetic experiences are powerful experiences that make one think, interpret, and feel beyond the certainty of facts and the mundane parts of existence. Aesthetics offers humans the means to heighten our awareness of self and other. Thus, the study of aesthetics in education suggests there is a latent potential that exists in learning beyond simply acquiring objective information to logically discern reality. Defining aesthetics, a complicated task given the nature of aesthetics across disciplines, is achieved by taking the reader through three perennial debates within aesthetics that have education import: the trouble with human passions, the reign of beauty, and aesthetic thought beyond beauty. In addition, the influence of aesthetics and imagination on experience and education as articulated most notably by Maxine Greene and John Dewey offers the obvious entry point for educators seeking to understand aesthetics. Looking beyond the philosophical literature on aesthetics and education, new directions in aesthetics and education as seen in the growing literature traced through the study of cognition, behavior, biology, and neuroscience offers educators potentially new sites of aesthetics inquiry. However, the overwhelming trajectory of the study of aesthetics and education allows educators to move beyond the hyper-scientific study of education and alternatively consider how felt experiences—aesthetic experiences—often brought about when fully engaged with others and one’s environment, are sites of powerful learning opportunities with moral, ethical, and civic consequences.