From transaction to transformation

One of my committee members recently commented on my embodiment post. In my response I started to focus on the idea of transaction. The focus arose out of a desire to promote and enhance the concept of the quality of transaction in Greene's writing. It occurred to me that the way in which we interact with the world deepens this sense of embodiment and differentiates Greene from other thinkers and writers who have commented on embodiment.

I noted that embodiment is about the constant reflection of how we view ourselves within the context of our perceived world. It is my sensibility that we are witness to transactions with the world that continue to operate within the realm of a mind/body split. I am thinking in terms of educational practice and in how we define success. We continue to assess the success of our students (and our practice) through a predominately retention/regurgitation framework. And though I'm critiquing policy with this example, policy is a means of how we transact with the world. 

Of course, this can all be viewed as a transactional dilemma: our misguided practices are fundamentally poorly conceived transactions with the world. However, does how we transact connect directly to something more profound than mere practice options? Is this why we struggle with social justice? Is this why social justice isn't just the soil (per Dewey's discussion of embodiment in Nature and Experience) but points to a more profound split? How do the bottom-line-must-dominate CEOs and the just-say-no legislative representatives and their practices sleep at night? I conceive of these practices as poor transactions. I conceive of these transactions as a fundamental split between mind and body. With that split, the transactional can never become transformational.


With Greene, I can start to chart a process by which the transactional becomes transformational. In transacting with the world, we become situated in our understandings, our processes, our angle of repose. Through reflection this situatedness becomes embodied. Our understanding signifies that union of mind and body, even relinking what once may have been split. This is what represents the lived life: the embodied situatedness of our being. It is the lived life that primes us to encounter the world through an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic represents the embodied encounter, an encounter that has the ability to be transformative because of the reflective practice that enables us to notice the new. It is the act of writing and rewriting our lived world (Releasing the Imagination, 1995, p. 147).

Mouth feel, Pt. II

I have been using speech recognition software to transcribe the oodles of citations that I have highlighted in various texts regarding Maxine Greene, existentialism and phenomenology. I'm presently attempting to organize the pages of citations into data fields using a framework that assigns to them subject areas of situatedness, embodiment and aesthetics.

Not surprisingly, the speech recognition isn't perfect in transcribing what I think I'm reading aloud into accurate text documents. This is due to a number of factors: my misreading of the text (some of which includes Greek and French references); my increasingly twangy speech patterns (the western twang I was born into is intensifying with age); and the unreadability of the text itself.

This "unreadability" is embedded in the fact that some of these texts were not written to be spoken aloud. You may think that this then makes the texts "unspeakable." But I think it ultimately makes them unreadable as well. Shouldn't all writing take into account readability and speak-ability? Shouldn't writing have an awareness of where the breath should occur? Shouldn't writing take into account the "mouth feel" of the language? Shouldn't writing be a soliloquy?

Interestingly, the speech recognition software accurately transcribed all of the Greene references within the citations I dictated. Greene's writing can be spoken. This comes as no surprise as I had recently unearthed from the cellar my notes from the graduate courses I had taken with Maxine. Reading those notes from 1994-96 was like reading a draft of "Releasing the Imagination," which was published at the same time. Her lectures are readable and her writing is worthy of a soliloquy.

In my prospectus for my disseration I wrote that I wanted my work to be readable. That determination has not waned!

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.

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.