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.