On being within and without

I've been reviewing Maxine Greene's Landscapes of Learning. I was surprised to not see more instances of lived life/lives within the text, yet the term is present. What I think may be its variant, lived worlds, is especially prominent as it assumes the title of the final chapter of the book.

I am recognizing that within Landscapes, lived life is almost always connected to discussion regarding emancipation. This is an area that one of my committee members recommended I pay attention to when thinking about the lived life. And sure enough, there is a connection. Greene uses lived life within her discussion of emancipatory education, which signals the need for teachers to educate based on the lived lives of their students. This is supported through her sustained argument for the primacy of the students' lived lives over the benchmarks of empiricism and scientism, and our reliance on technique (a very interesting contrast perhaps to Stella Adler's adherence to technique?).

But the term, or its variant lived worlds, is also foundational to her discussion of the emancipation of women, especially women who teach. So the theme of emancipatory education is more than a focus on the students, but also on the teachers. Her discussion of the importance of recognizing the lived worlds of women is a charge for women to assert their own lived worlds, their own perceptual reality instead of donning a mask to assume another's sense of reality, another's sense of what everyday life is or should be. The power in asserting these lived worlds and lives is partly embedded in the power of giving symbol to these entities. Whether it be language or another form of expression (cue the arts here), giving a name to the perceived reality, to the lived life, is to give it form and to recognize it as substantial. It also provides the opportunity to then consider alternatives to a reality that may be full of lacks and deficiencies.

But how is the lived life achieved or assumed? To have a lived life one needs to be reflective Greene says. It is an act of consciousness.

In a sense, transcendences and interrogations provide a leitmotif in human experience as persons become increasingly able to thematlze, to problematize, to interpret their own lived worlds. Merleau-Ponty says that what defines the human being "is not the capacity to create a second nature--economic, social, or cultural--beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity to go beyond created structures in order to create others." To me, this has enormous relevance for teaching--the kind of teaching that moves persons to reflection and to going beyond. Only, however, if educators can remain in touch with their own histories, their own background consciousnesses, can they engage with others who are making their own efforts to transcend (1978, p. 103).

So the lived life is an act of consciousness evoked by the individual. Right now I'm working with the idea that the lived life might also need to include the act of recognition by another for it to culminate. That the power of the lived life can only be achieved when one recognizes the value of another. It rests in the ability to of one to reflect/understand and the other to recognize.

On a side note: last night we saw a production of Smudge, a play by Rachel Axler. The story centers on a couple who give birth to a severely underdeveloped child; the baby is just a stub with a single eye, no limbs, no form of expression. The father works for the U.S. Census and starts reading  philosophical treatises on being-ness and consciousness while at work. His ponderings about the mass of grey that seems to now pervade his once black-and-white/binary/census-tract world erupts in a hysterical showdown between him and his brother/co-worker. I was laughing so hard the tears were streaming down my face. It was the perfect comic interlude for someone questioning "objectivity" in research.