Maxine's table: connecting action with imagination in the thought of maxine greene and hannah arendt

Educational Theory

Volumn 53, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 203-220

  Wilson, Teresa ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 63849176881     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2003.00203.x     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Maxine Greene, "Teaching: The Question of Personal Reality," Teachers College Record 80, no. 1 (1978): 34. This article will be cited as TPR in the text for all subsequent references.
2. Greene adopts the word "challenger" from Arendt; see Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, Viking Penguin, 1961),4. This book will be cited as BPF in the text for all subsequent references.
3. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45-56; and Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," in Between Past and Future, 173-196.
4. See also Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
5. Aaron Schutz has written on the common ground between Arendt and Greene on the subject of "public spaces"; however, his argument pursues a different direction than mine. See Aaron Schutz, "Creating Local 'Public Spaces' in Schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene," Curriculum Inquiry 29, no. l(1999): 77-98.
6. Maxine Greene, Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 19881, xi. This book will be cited as DF in the text for all subsequent references.
7. Char's aphorism is one of 237 collected under the title, "Leaves of Hypnos: A War Journal (1943-1944)" in Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose of Rend Char, trans. and ed. Jackson Mathews [New York: Random House, 1956], 108.
8. For Greene's discussion of this experience, see Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995),2. This book will be cited as RI in the text for all subsequent references. The word "citizen" took on very different meanings during and after the French Resistance. During the Resistance, ordinary people filled the gap left by the French government by constituting a public realm through their collective and individual acts of resistance. These same individuals experienced a feeling of irrelevance after the war. For more on this subject, see Martin Blumenson, The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977); and Frida Knight, The French Resistance, 1940-1944 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975).
9. What was René Char's involvement in the Resistance? Unlike a host of writers who published underground during the Nazi occupation, Char was recruited into the French army. As Eric Marty noted, "René Charest l'un des rares po"tes ou intellectuals a avoir effectivement et efficacement, comrne principal responsable de la zone sud de la France, combattu, les arrnes f la main, l'occupation allemande" ["As the person responsihle for the Southern region of France, René Char is one of those rare poets or intellectuals to have effec.tively taken up arms against the German occupation."]; see Marty, Rend Char (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 19901, 167. Many French writers chose to resist through their writing as resistance; see Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Poetics and Narrative Forms, 1940-1 950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
10. Char, on the other hand, believed that, while poetry informs and precedes political action, their aims can come into conflict: "toute action quise justifie doit-tre...unereaction proposable de refus et résistance, inspirée par une poésie en avant et souvcnt en dispute avec elle" ["All justifiable action must...admit of the possibility of refusal or resistance. Such action is often inspired by poetry but is also often in conflict with it" (that is, one cannot be a poet and an actor, in the political sense, at one and same time).] (Rene Char, "Réponses Interrogatives f une question de Martin Heidegger, Récherché de la Base et du Sommet," ["Provocative Replies to a Question of Martin Heidegger's Investigated from Top to Bottom"] 734-735, 736;
11. cited in Marty, René Char, 171). Only after the war did Char resume publishing.
12. Maxine Greene, Teacher us Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1973). This book will be cited as TS in the text for all subsequent references.
13. Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision: The Search for American Education and Literature (New York: Random House, 1965), 49.
14. Ibid., 4.
15. See, for example, Shirley Brice Heath, "The Sense of Being Literate: Historical and Cross-cultural Features," in Handbook of Reading Research, vol. 2, eds. Michael Kamil, Peter Mosenthal, P. David Pearson, and Rebecca Barr (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 4-7.
16. Maxine Greene, "Toward Possibility: Expanding the Range of Literacy," English Education 18, no. 4 [1986]: 242.
17. Ibid., 241.
18. The ideas discussed in this section have been condensed from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). This book will be cited as HC in the text for all subsequent references.
19. In an informal debate at the University of Toronto, Arendt fielded concerns that her notion of the political is exclusionary and that it excludes precisely those social factors - race, gender, class - that condition "who" can appear in the world. For more on this, see Hannah Arendt, "Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt," inHannah Arendt: TheRecoveryofthe Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 301339.
20. Norm Fruchter, "Pursuing Public Space: Maxine Greene and the Sameness in Utter Diversity," in A Light in Dark Times, eds. William C. Ayers and Janet L. Miller (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 229.
21. Maxine Greene, "Difference, Inclusion, and the Ethical Community: Moving Beyond Relativism," in Multidimensional Aspects of Literacy Research, Theory, and Practice, eds. Charles K. Kinzer and Donald J. Leu (Chicago: National Reading Conference, 1994),28-39. This article will be cited as DI in the text for all subsequent references.
22. Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," 175.
23. Maxine Greene, "Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings," Teachers College Record 95, no. 2 (1993): 218.
24. For example, Nicholas Burbules and Thomas Callister, Jr., argue for the creation of Internet communities as "common spaces" in education; see Burbules and Callister, "What Kind of Community Can the Internet Be?" in Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies for Education (Boulder, Colorado: West view Press, 2000), 153-182.
25. Creating public spaces in education is usually aligned with a call for democratic classrooms, as in Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Linda C. Powell, "Communities of Difference: A Critical Look at Desegregated Spaces Created for and by Youth," Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 2 (1997): 253;
26. Michael Rose, "Introduction," in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995); and Carolyn Shields, "Learning from Difference: Considerations for Schools as Communities," Curriculum Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2000): 291. William Pinar sees the task of the "new century" as "the intellectual formation of a public sphere in education" -a task that is connected with "a resuscitation of the progressive project in which we renew and perform our commitment to the democratization of American society"; see Pinar, "The Researcher as Bricoleur: The Teacher as Public Intellectual," Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 4 (2001): 698.
27. M'hammed Mellouki and Clermont Gauthier, "L'enseignant, un intellectual" ["The Teacher, an Intellectual"] (paper presented at the twenty-ninth annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Lava1 University, Quebec City, Quebec, May 2001).
28. See also Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision.
29. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1955).
30. Arendt, "Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt," 308.
31. Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," Social Research 38, no. 3 [ 1971]: 41 7. This article will be cited as TMC in the text for all subsequent references.
32. For Arendt's "banality of evil" argument, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmunn in 1erusulern (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Of all the areas of investigation into Arendt's scholarship, this thesis of hers has attracted the most attention and debate by far. See Richard J. Bernstein, "Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil," in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, eds. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 127-146.
33. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2 (New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
34. Hannah Arendt, "Who IsGuilty-Manorthe System?" Current(December, 1964): 55. Cited in Greene, Teacher as Stranger, 233.
35. See Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," for this argument.
36. Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning (Nw York: Teachers College Press, 1978). This book will be cited as LL in the text for all subsequent references.
37. Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory [New York: Knopf, 1989), 283. Cited in Greene, "Difference, Inclusion, and the Ethical Community," 29.
38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York Harfner, 1951). Cited in kendt, The Life of the Mind, 257.
39. John Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (Boston: D.C. Heath, 19331, 14.
40. DonaldSchon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Thinkin Action (New York: BasicBooks, 1983 );
41. and Kenneth Zeichner, "Alternative Paradigms of Teacher Education," Journal of Teacher Education 34, no. 3 (1983): 3-9.
42. David Coulter and John R. Wiens, "Educational Judgment: Linking the Actor and the Spectator," Educationa~Researcher 31no. 4 (2002):1 5-25;
43. and Joseph Dunne, Bock to the Rough Ground: "Phronesis" and "Techne" in Modern Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
44. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954].
45. Maxine Greene, "Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens," Teachers College Record 66, no. 5 [ 1965): 420.
46. Ibid.
47. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1938); and Louise Rosenblatt, The Render, the Text, the Poem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). John Willinsky criticized Louise Rosenblatt for abandoning her social concern for literature and pursuing an aestheticized version of reader response; see Willinsky, The Triumph of Literature/The Fate of Literacy [New York: Teachers College Press, 1991].
48. Greene, "Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens," 420.
49. Ibid.
50. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
51. Greene, "Real Toads and Imaginaq Gardens," 423. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Great Works of Joseph Conrad (New York: Harper Collins, 1967).
52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
53. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [London: George Allen and Unwin, 19541, 183
54. Ibid.,183-184.
55. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
56. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184;
57. cited in Greene, "Teaching," 33. A recent and provocative source on the significance of narrative to Arendt's political thought is Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001}. Another valuable source on the relation between action and stories in Arendt's thinking is Paul Ricoeur, "Action, Story and History: On Re-reading The Human Condition," in The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner [New York: Peter Lang, 19901, 149-164.
58. William F. Pinar, ed., The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: "I am.. .not yet" (London: Falmer Press, 19981, 1.
59. Pinar, ed., The Dassionate Mind of Maxine Greene; and Ayers and Miller, eds., A Light in Dark Times.
60. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19681, ix.
61. Ibid., viii-ix.
62. Ayers and Miller, Light in Dark Times, x, ix.