Abstract
Maxine Greene (1917–2014) was not only an outstanding social activist, teacher and philosopher, whose works on aesthetic education and social imagination contributed to the theoretical field of Philosophy of Education; she was also an iconic woman within academic philosophy, whose praxis is cut through by a preoccupation with the effective questioning of the patriarchal worldview and the challenging of education’s function for democracy. This chapter reassesses her notion of aesthetic education in the light of its influences, and of a broader transition of her position with regards to both education and feminism—a transition from situatedness and autonomy, into community relationality. Secondly, aesthetic education is examined as a meaningful experience and as a task that involves some kind of agency and participation, directed toward an attention that is able to appreciate detail. Finally, the potential of Greene’s aesthetic education for shaping contemporary curricula and caring communities is assessed.
This research was possible thanks to the funding of the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte for the formation of university faculty (FPU17/03526) of Spain.
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Notes
- 1.
The Maxine Greene Institute is today an active corporation, providing a virtual platform to study and discuss Greene’s thought, and facilitating its members’ access to many unpublished resources through the Maxine Greene Library, a repository for her papers, speeches, books and video recordings of her public appearances.
- 2.
For a comparative approach between Greene’s notion of praxis and Arendt’s, with regards to educational practices, see Wilson (2003).
- 3.
The language of limits and confinement used to describe the lifeworld of women finds its analogous expression in the critique of an education which seeks to discipline and transmit a preestablished table of matters. Vindicating the role of imagination in education, Greene would use in 2005 the metaphor of a classroom with its doors and windows shut to describe the space that is created when the teacher authoritatively silences the pupils and generates a classroom which “may be like that of being in a closed room with the windows shut against the “world” others are seeing and accepting” (Greene, 2005, p. 78).
- 4.
- 5.
This was not her first institutional breakthrough: Greene had become the first female president of the Philosophy of Education Society in 1967.
- 6.
“As is obvious, I have been much influenced by Dewey’s Art as Experience and by a number of existential and phenomenological works—Sartre’s, Dufrenne’s, Heidegger’s” (Greene, 1998a, p. 10).
- 7.
Aesthetic education functions in this sense not a description, but rather as a prescriptive concept that prescribes what education should be like.
- 8.
Greene’s concept of aesthetic education can contribute to the argument for the integration of the arts in BA Philosophy curriculum. This was shown in the experience of the museum-based Seminar of Aesthetics and Art Theory: Philosophy with Picasso, a module for third and fourth-year students of the BA Philosophy at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, created in 2016 by Dr. Jèssica Jaques. I have been part of the teaching staff for three consecutive years (2018–2021). In 2019, the Seminar structured its sessions in a two-fold manner, a first part in the rooms of Picasso Museum of Barcelona and a second part in the classroom. The displacement from the classroom into the museum affected how students approached the texts. As the testimonials of the students showed, the museum environment triggered an attentive mode of perception that opened new possible readings of the philosophical texts. Students described this experience as a “change of pace” from academic accelerated temporality toward an aesthetic appreciation of detail.
- 9.
Dolores D. Liston has examined the implicit and explicit male biases in anthologies of essays on philosophy of education and concluded that “[p]hilosophy purports to be a study human understanding and being in the world … our best ideas, our best attempts to understand ourselves in world, our truth, our knowing, our being, and our commitment to creating ethical relationships with one another. Nonetheless, despite the fact that half of ‘us’ are women, the field has stifled voices of women and others who are embedded in the everyday world. People who do not fit Rousseau's criteria of the individual need not look for themselves in the world of traditional philosophy” (Liston, 2001, p. 355).
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Pérez Casanovas, À. (2022). Maxine Greene: Teaching Philosophy in Aesthetic Environments. In: Miras Boronat, N.S., Bella, M. (eds) Women in Pragmatism: Past, Present and Future. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00921-1_15
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