Mouth feel

The other morning as I waited for the espresso to make its gravity-defying journey into the upper chamber, I paced the kitchen in despair. My literature review was allowing me to delve into many pockets of insight regarding Maxine's work but not one bit of the reading mentioned the "lived life." I've been making my own connections with terms like "life world" and "situatedness" but the "l-l" grail was out of reach.

In a recent comment to Allan DiBiase, I noted that I have found myself "linking arms" with the word "embodiment." Likewise with "situatedness." As with the "lived life," these are words/terms that prick up my ears (to borrow from John Lahr and Joe Orton).

This past summer I had a theatre artist in a graduate arts education course that I teach. In my teaching--which utilizes an approach developed by the Lincoln Center Institute based on Maxine Greene's philosophy--there is lots of reflection and sharing. When words or phrases emerge that prick up my ears, I write them down on the whiteboard, or chart paper. It's not unusual for the walls to be covered in words and phrases by the week's end. My student was excited by the word tent we were living in. "It's because I'm a theatre person," she explained. "I LOVE words."

As my roommate in Queens (and now a philosophy professor in the Midwest) used to say, "mmm, texty!"

"Lived life," "embodiment" and "situatedness" are mmm, texty. They have mouth feel for me. It may indeed be a theatre thing, but they represent a sensibility that can be physicalized in my mind/body. While "embodiment" is low in my anatomy, around the hips and my center of gravity, "situatedness" is all about the mouth and its articulators--the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue.

I have decided to use "embodiment" and "situatedness" as part a framework for how I will present my review of the literature. And because odd numbers are more interesting than even ones, I have added "aesthetic." This third term is important given the uniqueness with which Maxine approaches the term.

And while imagination is a theme that comes up over and over again in the writings of others on Maxine's work, I want to make sure that my work on Maxine Greene is aligned with "aesthetics." There has been a tendency to equate "imagination" with "aesthetic" and it is simply wrong.

Besides, "aesthetic" has a far more interesting mouth feel than "imagination."

The lived-through versus the lived life

I am scouring Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" in an attempt to understand Maxine Greene's development of the "lived life." Though I haven't come across the "l-l" paradigm, I have used the occasion to try to find the origins of le corps vecu or, "the lived body," as mentioned in Baldacchino. After running around in circles, I have come across discussions in papers posted on the Internet about Merleau-Ponty and Husserl and their views on "le corps vecu" or in the case of Husserl, "Leib." I will now take a look at Husserl to try to come to terms with "Leib." (Thank goodness for holiday gift cards redeemable at book retailers.)

In my quest for "le corps vecu" in Merleau-Ponty, I came across instances of the "lived-through." In closing the mind/body split, Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is a synthesized and unified body that grasps meaning and that the body is a "grouping of lived-through meanings."

Later in the book, the "lived-through" takes on qualifiers such as "purely" and "merely." Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the lived-through in and of itself is not an experience without the possibility of expression: "Moreover, there is no experience without speech as the purely lived-through has no part in the discursive life of man."    

So now I ask, is the "lived life" in Maxine Greene a more fully realized concept of experience than the merely "lived-through"? Is the "lived life" a fuller embodiment that takes into account expression? Time will tell...

Embodiment

I'm reading, reading, reading. Hoping that the reading, reading, reading is going to elicit a literature review. A literature review of what? I'm still not sure. I have written about using the review as an opportunity to investigate the writers who have impacted Maxine Greene as a means towards defining key concepts/words/ideas. I liked that idea but somehow it seemed overwhelming to me. Readers and students often respond to Greene as being extraordinarily well-read, extremely literate. And as readers and students we often feel incapable of matching such an well-read, literate mind.

Another idea is to review what others have written about Greene in an effort to get a glimpse from elsewhere as the origins and meanings behind my search of the "lived life" in Greene's works. Naturally, I am having difficulty finding anything that touches on the phrase either within Greene's canon and elsewhere in philosophy, literature, education.

But I did come across some essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's le corps vecu in Baldacchino's "Education Beyond Education." The lived body or "embodiment" was the existentialist reconciliation of the mind/body split. It promotes an active stance towards philosophy and knowledge and helps us to understand Greene's promotion of doing philosophy.

In thinking about this, I was reminded of my own corps vecu training in acting. Training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU, I encountered a number of physical approaches to creating and doing theatre. Jerzy Grotowski was a god on the 2nd floor of 721 Broadway. Grotowski wrote:

"The rhythm of life in modern civilization is characterized by pace, tension, a feeling of doom, the wish to hide our personal motives and the assumption of a variety of roles and masks in life (different ones with our family, at work, amongst friends or in community life, etc.-). We like to be 'scientific', by which we mean discursive and cerebral, since this attitude is dictated by the course of civilization. But we also want to pay tribute to our biological selves, to what we might call physiological pleasures. We do not want to be restricted in this sphere. Therefore we play a double game of intellect and instinct, thought and emotion; we try to divide ourselves artificially into body and soul. When we try to liberate ourselves from it all we start to shout and stamp, we convulse to the rhythm of music. In our search for liberation we reach biological chaos. We suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves."

There was a great deal of shouting and stamping in those ETW studios. As actors we were embodying the text, the action, the story. Nancy Lesko in "Feeling the Teacher" writes about her own embodiment of Greene's teachings as a result of her sabbatical sojourn to Teachers College in 1996. As a yoga devotee, Lesko felt a lightness in her step and a realignment of her body every Monday evening as she exited the lecture space in Main Hall to return to her student family housing in Morningside Heights.

The lived life versus the lived body? I'm sure where this may be taking me but le corps vecu is very attractive to me as an Odin Theatre/Grotowski trained/Bogart influenced actor.

The journey continues...

How do I summarize?

I have an opportunity in the next week to teach a session of undergrad students enrolled in a historical and philosophical perspectives of education course. It will serve as a demonstration of my teaching abilities for a search committee looking to hire a new faculty member. I will, of course, devote the session to Maxine Greene.

In doing my prep I found myself running in circles. Not twisting in productive spirals, but re-meeting myself every 360 degrees in repetitive loops. Why? WHY?? The "why" is waged in a quandary with "how do I summarize Maxine Greene's philosophy?"

Well, there is the "doing philosophy" which I find to be incredibly helpful, especially for newbies encountering philo-speak for the first time.

There's Maxine's particular take on aesthetics and how it differs from the more pragmatic approach of Dewey.

There's the sheer difficulty of life with its exclusionary impulses that shapes her approach to phenomenology and the ideals of social justice.

There's the "without answers" quality of the arts which provide timeless questions for both students and teachers to ponder.

There's the wonder of a 93-year old, female Jewish intellectual living across East 89th Street from the Guggenheim Museum who has stated that "Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious."

And there's the value and richness of the "lived life."

It comes down to doing and being. Not an easy conceit for most college juniors especially within a 45-minute span. But the doing part is incredibly important and accessible. The being aspect can be a prompt or challenge at the conclusion to take a later moment to reflect.

Be present. Engage. Find questions.

On being an impostor and becoming

I have been reading William Ayers' collection of essays on Maxine Greene, "A Light in Dark Times." In one of the early essays, Wendy Kohli of Fairfield University writes about Maxine's association with the impostor syndrome. When Maxine first earned her doctorate, there was a great deal of disdain/disregard/noses upturned in the field of philosophy about educational philosophy being inferior to "real" philosophy.

Maxine never bought the doctoral regalia she earned because she never considered herself to be a real professor.

Yet Maxine is also fully conscious in her writing about her status of "becoming." She writes of a constant state of invention and revision, of digging deeper and reaching wider. The line often ascribed to her is "I am not yet."

I'm wondering if there is a connection between the external forces that place many of us under the fear of being an impostor, of not knowing enough, not being good enough and our internal aesthetic process of constant reconsidering. Because we haven't reached a state of conclusion about our ideas and our own self, we take the risk of feeling inferior. It's the difference between aligning with the categorical and working to understand/up-end/re-imagine it. It's imagination as a constant.

Imagination as impostor...

Social justice

I am in the midst of a deep reading of "Teacher as Stranger," Maxine Greene's 1973 volume of educational philosophy for the "contemporary age." In reading it one can't help but to imagine the world of 1973 when issues of social justice were raw and writ large in protests and rallies and riots. In the 2001 bio-documentary, "Exclusions & Awakenings," Greene speaks directly to the excitement that the 1960s brought to higher education. She applauds the protests happening in the hallways of Teachers College at the time (lots of guitar playing) and across 120th Street on the Columbia campus. She wishes she was younger and could join the students.

Reading "Teacher as Stranger" in 2010 has a certain surreal aspect to it. It is surreal in that I both remember very fervently the times in which it was written (though I was quite young, but as a middle-class, suburban family we sometimes ventured to the University District in Seattle to "see the hippies") and I can approach the time from a vantage point of forty years in the future. This propels me to ask what has changed in the intervening years? What have we learned? What does social justice mean to us today?

In many circles there is a discomfort associated with the term, "social justice." There are dozens of websites that disdain the practice and more specifically, the practitioners. William Ayers is a common target. Ayers is the former Weatherman who is now a retired education professor from the University of Illinois. Because he and Barack Obama served on a couple of nonprofit boards together in Chicago, his name exploded in the press during the 2008 presidential election. And because he studied with Maxine Greene and has edited a book of essays about her, Greene is commonly targeted as well for her progressive, liberal, social justice-laden work.

And yet, the "philosophy" behind No Child Left Behind can be interpreted as an action for social justice. The accountability measures are in place, supposedly, to ensure that no child is denied an adequate education due to socio-economic and developmental issues. To me, these efforts speak loudly to the definition of social justice. But I don't think this is the spin or branding that was sought after by the policy makers. I imagine that policy makers would want to distance themselves from such a liberal ideal.

Another thought entered my mind while reading and that is the idea of progress. To consider the progress that our society has made towards social justice in the past 40 years. The election of President Barack Obama is certainly an aspect of progress. But then there are questions regarding his birth, his faith, and other conspiracies. I am heartened and amazed by the greater acceptance that homosexuals experience in the public sphere but then I read about the horrible murders in the Bronx a week ago. Trend spotters report that women will soon become the primary earners in their households but the pay gap between the genders still persists.

Yes, there is progress in evidence but the action of vanquish is still a long ways off. I sometimes fear that our fear of terms, like "social justice," "progressive," "liberal," can make the work more difficult. Too much effort is devoted to cloaking the task at hand.  So much energy is spent on spin. Call it what it is and get on with the work.

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Content by Kelly Doremus Stuart, designed by Angela King

About a month ago, Gia Kourlas wrote in the New York Times about the blurring of words used to describe dance that is not classical. This is dance that at one time might be have been referred to as "modern." Some of the pioneers of "modern" could include the likes of Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Dorothy Humphrey and others.

And then in post-modern times (I'm not sure exactly when that transition happened--just like the confusion of when we had officially entered the 21st century: January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001?), the label of "contemporary" was picked up. As Kourlas wrote, "the word contemporary was a sterile if functional way to describe work that wasn't traditional modern dance or ballet." From this we can infer that our post-modern sensibility had rendered "modern" dance as "traditional." In fact, modern dance had become as traditional as classical dance. I'm shaking my head with my cheeks slapping back and forth like Curly Howard after being bonked on the noggin' by a brick from overhead.

Kourlas goes on to bemoan how the term "contemporary" has now come to no longer refer to an "artistic movement but a way of dancing that generally includes unison formations, swift kicks, rolls to the floor and cheap sentimentality." It's the stuff that is now seen on reality television series devoted to dance.

Shoot. I was just getting the hang of the modern/contemporary divide.

The solution to this dilemma of how to approach what is contemporary, what is modern and maybe most importantly, what is good, rests in the idea and sensibility of "choreography." It is an ontological reduction. Kourlas claims choreography as "the only word that really holds it all in: the questions, the craft, the imagination, the design, the multimedia and, finally, the showbiz."

I bring this up because I am still struggling with how to approach my "methodology" for researching Maxine Greene's work. It is an interpretive inquiry. It is heuristic. It is arts-based. One of my solutions is to call my research methods "practice" instead of methodology. For me, "practice" is more closely related to the artistic process and the mode of aesthetic inquiry.

But I'm not sure how to refer to the style of practice I will be using. Part of the dilemma is that it is an ongoing process.  I don't know for certain what it will look like in the end or the scope of elements it will use in its progression. What term could possibly capture the "showbiz" of what I am attempting?

I tell my students each day that this is the risk involved in the creative process: this ambiguity of form and structure and end results. I tell them it takes courage to engage in such an open environment where boundaries aren't certain.

With my own earnest advice, I shall simply do and see where it takes me. The labels will emerge in practice.

Seeking permission

Yesterday during lunch I caught the end of an episode of  Masterclass, a series of HBO documentaries that follow emerging artists in masterclass environments. The mentor under study during lunch yesterday was playwright Edward Albee. (This may have been synchronistic as I had spent the previous day scouring the Web for video of Marian Seldes'--a master Albee interpreter---2010 Tony Award speech during which she said nothing. I wanted to show it to my speech students but couldn't find any video. Sigh.)

During the Albee segment, a protege asked about having permission to veer away from the writing adage, "write what you know." The young writer had been expressing interest in issues of human rights and abuses of those rights in other cultures. She was clearly hesitant about creating a life world that was not her own. Albee encouraged her and her peers to not be constrained by their own experience. It was crucial for writers to follow their own impulses and ultimately, the impulses and direction of the characters. And those impulses are sometimes outside of our own life experience.

I was struck by the polarity of the Albee protege's concerns to that of my own. While the protege was seeking permission to step outside of her life world and emotional background, I have been seeking permission to step back in.

In my conversations with committee members,  I have discovered an "aha" moment that occurred during my studies with Maxine Greene. The moment was when Greene encouraged us students to write from our own experience, to use "I" in our narrative assignments for her. This was the first time I had been given "permission" to use "I" in my academic writing and essentially, "I" in my creative process. It was scary. It was hard. It was Maxine.

I am adopting this practice in my dissertation work and in my methodology, or practice. My interpretation will be formed through my own reading and lens, perhaps without consideration of other writers' views on Greene's work. This may be truly hermeneutic work. There is tremendous responsibility involved in such a practice; it touches on issues of morality and ethics both in the process and in the interpretation. It's scary. It's hard. It's Maxine.

Narrative

This morning I came across an article in InsideHigherEd that discussed the creation and use of a graphic novel in an intro to business course. The novel, Atlas Black: Managing to Succeed, follows a slacker type who goes into business for himself. The reported advantage to this character-driven approach to business basics is that students can identify real-world applications with the concepts they're studying. And given our 21st-century, visual-based culture, the graphic nature of the novel appeals to millennials.

One of the challenges reported in the article to using a novel as a textbook is the narrative arc. The arc evidently makes it difficult for instructors to "skip around"; it "confines the professor to framing a course entirely around the book." Using a novel essentially forces an instructor to create a narrative arc in structuring their course. But I will bet that students retain and more readily apply concepts as a result of using narrative, or story, in the teaching process.

I was talking with a committee member last week. We were looking at the terms that I would need to define in my dissertation, like existentialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, In my prospectus I suggested going to Sartre for existentialism, Merleau-Ponty for phenomenology, etc. He suggested to me that when Maxine Greene defines these terms in her writing, she's more likely to use Camus than Sartre. While I don't know if that indeed is the case (Sartre figures predominantly in her writing as does The Plague), it raised a question/opportunity for this dissertation. What if I were to follow Greene's model and use literature to define my terms in this dissertation?

Yowza!

I love this idea. Really using Greene as a model, really using an aesthetic approach to writing/thinking about the dissertation process, really employing an arts-based educational research practice to this work. But ohhh...the reading...yikes.

I am nowhere close to being as well-read as Maxine Greene. Her love/experience/attachment to literature is glorious and phenomenal. Studying with Maxine afforded the opportunity to widen and deepen my own literature experience. How joyful it was in graduate school to engage in Morrison and Allende and Melville while also having to tackle the Harvard Business Review and fair use court decisions. I have often chided myself for not also using literature in the courses I teach--both the critical and creative thinking courses are prime opportunities for this, as is the critical perspectives course in arts advocacy.

Maybe using literature in the dissertation will help bridge me to using literature in my teaching--which is part of my rationale. I should, I really should.

This will be a literature review to end all literature reviews...

Stopping short of social justice

I recently came across a blog post on "Education Next." The piece was written by Mark Bauerlein who worked on arts education policy at the National Endowment for the Arts under Dana Gioia. The post, "Arts Education Goes Activist," focuses on Bauerlein's concern that the National Art Education Association had adopted a theme of social justice for their 2010 convention. Bauerlein seems to be wholly dissatisfied with any arts education outcomes that are not arts-discipline based.

Maxine Greene's name was cited given her writing on aesthetics and social justice. I don't know how closely Bauerlein has read Greene's works, but any reckoning of "outcomes" in her writings on aesthetics is not solely clad in social justice chain mail. Her promotion of students engaged in encountering works of art is linked to imagination and inquiry and the desire to learn more, know more.

Imagination, inquiry, desire may all be traits of social justice, but they are also traits of critical thinking and creativity. I realize that there is value in advocating for the arts on the basis of skill development in art production, but why stop so short? Why not highlight traits that are shared across disciplines? Why not integrate multiple entry points in a learning situation to reach as many students as possible? Why not focus on how the arts pervade our lives beyond the canvasses on museum walls?

Value can be defined in myriad ways. I think it's our job in the business of the arts/education/curiosity to help others explore the multiplicity of value when it comes to the arts.

Text is cool. Language is hot.

The scanning process continues. I try to be cool and objective, literally searching--without digital or electronic aid-- for the term "lived life." But then I get swept into the language. I try not to see the "language," but instead to search for text. Just words. A couple of "l's" strung together. It's a "Where's Waldo?" approach.

But Greene sweeps me in with her language. I end up reading and thinking and interpreting and bringing my particular sense, my live life, to the language.

This happened with Greene's chapter on "Approaches to Truth and Being" in "Teacher as Stranger." In her remarks about pragmatism, phenomenology, and existentialism,, I started to see Greene's foundation in her doing philosophy. I see her disposal of the role of pragmatism in its attempts to measure things, like humans, that cannot possibly be measure without some accounting of biography. While "lived life" isn't being used, I think I'm witnessing its development here in this 1973 publication.

Earlier this morning I reviewed a booklet on dissertations in the humanities. One of my committee members very thoughtfully sent it to me to help me with this framework. It's quite different form the empirical/science-based framework that is being promoted within the Ed.D. program. The booklet offers standards that use descriptors of outstanding, very good, acceptable and unacceptable.

Within one of the standards for outstanding, the qualities listed int he area of language included "hot." I like this. Language should be hot.

Text, on the other hand, is cool.

Panic & Spiraling

I was scanning "Teacher as Stranger" yesterday looking for the term "lived life" in Greene's text. I'm up to chapter 5 and haven't come across it. Oh dear. And the Amazon "search inside" feature of "The Dialectic of Freedom" also didn't find any occurrences of the term. Yikes.

My concern/panic/hive-inducing-dilemma is that I had thought the term appeared in these texts. My research methodology (I call it "practice") also assumes this.

But I did come across the term "life-world" in "Teacher as Stranger." It's a term I don't recall hearing or reading before in Greene's works. Maybe "life-world" developed into "lived life" in Greene's later texts? Another reason may be that Greene's later texts ("Releasing" and "Variations") are more closely aligned with aesthetic practice. So perhaps "lived life" is rooted in Greene's aesthetic philosophy?

And if so, can I still find a bridge between Greene's use of "lived life" and her focus on social justice? Or is "lived life" distinctly and discretely contained in aesthetics without a bridge into social justice? I hope not. Nor can I imagine such discrete applications in Greene's thinking and writing.

I had a conversation yesterday with a student. She's a distance learner in my Critical Perspectives course. We were talking about Dewey's definition of the aesthetic experience as having a conclusion or end. Yet aesthetic practice sees instead a spiraling that occurs. There is no end to the aesthetic experience. Questions beget questions. Inquiry branches into inquiry. There is a spiraling that occurs where the circulating movement of questions and inquiry expands wider and wider.

I'm spiraling.

Hello and welcome

I am starting this blog, "Living [Maxine] Greene,"  as part of my dissertation writing process. As made evident form the title, my dissertation focuses on Maxine Greene, the "philosopher queen" of Teachers College. It is my intention to define what Maxine means by the term the "lived life" in her writing and speaking. It's a term that has stuck itself into the far corners of my consciousness since I first studied with her in 1994.

I am using a pseudo arts-based educational research practice for my dissertation work. It is interpretive in nature and a means towards establishing my interpretations validity is through a process of self-reflection. And self-reflection is very appropriate in all things Maxine. The arts piece will be reflected in the use of my narrative "I" in my dissertation writing (also appropriate to Greene) which is not typical of the academy. It is also likely that some of these blog posts will not only inform my interpretation but they may even appear in the final product.

Big props must be extended to Cynthia Vascak of PSU for her coining of "Living Greene." Thanks, Cynthia.

And so here we go, here I go. Thank you, Maxine.