Devoted to and inspired by the late Maxine Greene, a champion of education and advocator of the arts, this book recognizes the importance of Greene's scholarship by revisiting her oeuvre in the context of the intellectual historicity that shaped its formation. As a scholar, Greene dialogued with philosophers, social theorists, writers, musicians, and artists. These conversations reveal the ways in which the arts, just like philosophy and science, allow for the facilitation of "wide-awakeness," a term that is central to Greene's pedagogy. Amidst contemporary trends of neoliberal, one-size-fits-all curriculum reforms in which the arts are typically squeezed out or pushed aside, Greene's work reminds us that the social imagination is stunted without the arts. Artistic ways of knowing allow for people to see beyond their own worlds and beyond "what is" into other worlds of "what was" and "what might" be some day. This volume demonstrates Maxine Greene's profound ability to illuminate the importance of the artistic world and the imaginary for development of the self in the world and for encouraging a "wide-awakeness" reflective of an emerging political awareness and a longing for a democratic world that "is not yet." This book was originally published as a Special Issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.
About the Author: Hannah Spector is Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State University, Harrisburg, USA, where she teaches on the foundations of education. Her work has been published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, amongst others.
Robert Lake is Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education at Georgia Southern University, USA. He teaches on diversity and multicultural education from both a local and global perspective. He is the author of Vygotsky on Education (2012), A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization: An Imaginative Dialogue with Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire: Information Age (2013), and Dear Maxine: Letters From the Unfinished Conversation with Maxine Greene (2011).
Tricia M. Kress is Associate Professor of Urban Education, Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. Her research uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology, and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning and research in urban schools. She details this approach in Critical Praxis Research: Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers (2011). She is also the editor of Paulo Freire's Intellectual Roots (with Robert Lake, 2013).
