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).

A conversation with the text

In my earlier post today I mentioned that I scanned Maxine Greene's Teacher as Stranger (1973) to locate instances of lived life in the text. There were none.

This was a hunch that I had prior to the data collection and knowing that, I made sure to also scan for what I might interpret as variations on lived life. And sure enough I was able to locate life-world which originated with Edmund Husserl. I also have a hunch that life-world becomes less frequent in Greene's later writings when lived life starts to make a presence. This may be a situation of coincidence, but it is possible that Greene abandoned Husserl's "Umwelt" for lived life.

With the scanning, I found myself talking to the text. Because lived life wasn't presenting itself, I started to take notice of other qualified "lifes" in Greene's writing: social life, family life, instinctual life, to name a few. I asked aloud if I would find these "lifes" in her later books. If I was to find that they're not present in her later books, would it be a fair deduction for me to think of these other "lifes" as being subsumed by lived life? Could lived life be a repository for the social, family, and instinctual aspects of life? If lived life is such a repository, could this mean that what once might have stood as a clear distinction among these other qualified "lifes" becomes blurred in Greene's later writing and thinking? Are these qualified "lifes" too intersubjectve/interconnected to be distinguished from one another?

I might be in line for a hermeneutic hat trick here...

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.

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.