On “The Continuing Search for Curriculum,”

chapter seven of Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, by Maxine Green

In this essay of the collection, Dr. Maxine Greene ties together beautifully the realms of aesthetics and equitable education, explaining how an aesthetic, artful education can achieve what is arguably one of the main goals of education, “relearning how to look at the world” (Merleau-Ponty, as cited in Greene, 2004, p. 99) for the purpose of allowing “students to develop a sense of agency and participation and to do in collaboration with one another” (Greene, p. 104) To give our students this agency, we have to both

1. Hold up “a kind of mirror… showing each of something something inaccessible without mirrors… transforming the self-consciousness” (Danto, as cited in Greene, 2004, p. 100)

2. Make them “see what [they] had not particularly wanted to see. But once seen, it [moves] to summon energies as never before to create meanings, to effect connections, to bring some vital order into existence.” (p. 98)

These two things are not necessarily at odds with one another, but it makes a case for a hybrid of culturally informed pedagogy and something else that the expertise of a teacher can facilitate.

As for the questions, “How do we develop curriculum? Do we develop it together or separately?” Historically speaking, regardless of who the “we” is, I’m afraid we’ve each been operating in vain isolation. Music teachers make decisions about what to teach their students without consulting all the other stakeholders - the students, the environment, the community, the other teachers. But we cannot create an environment in our classrooms for “what Dewey called social inquiry” (Greene, p. 102) that provides “adventures into meaning that might provoke learners to learn for the sake of repairing deficiencies in the social world as well as of becoming different in their personal lives” (p. 101) without “imagination and metaphor” (p. 99) which give the learner “a context in which interpretations can be made and significations read as they cannot be read in contextless abstractions” (p. 95). We must provide a safe space where we can show them the details of lives unlike their own. And the arts are a wonderful way of doing this with the nuance and complexity of life itself. Through the lens of Primo Levi, Greene warns us not to “impose a false clarity on history by ridding ourselves of ambiguities and paradoxes. Yet this is what is done, more of then than not, when the past is unrolled for children to see” (p. 96). Luckily, “seeing comes before words” (p. 103) she reminds us in the words of John Berger, and “where words are inadequate” (p. 103), music is there to provide experience.

Greene, M. (2004). Chapter Seven: The Continuing search for curriculum. In M. Greene (Author),

Releasing the imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (pp. 89-104).

Washington D.C.: National Association of Independent Books.