Imagination Is Walking Dead

• In Event: 47.015 - Biographical and Documentary Research SIG Business Meeting: Imagining an Activist Future for a Blue Guitar

Abstract

Maxine Greene (1995) defines the imagination as the “ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise” (p. 19). This is the skill displayed by the interior designer who walks into an empty room and visualizes how s/he wants it to look, then works towards the realization of that image. In the case of social justice education, we must be capable of imagining the world we want to create before we can see ourselves as “designers” of a better society. Imagination illuminates the path toward possibility. Until we are able to imagine what is yet to exist, we cannot see our power to change it. It's like the interior designer walks into a dark room. Without imagination, there is nothing that we can do to change the status quo, or for that matter, to create anything new and better.
Looking at the current educational status in the United States where policy dictates that a 'good teacher' is deskilled to a point of becoming an automaton only required to inject irrelevant data into children's minds and where children are rewarded by the amount of information they are capable of memorizing; where information is divorced from critical analysis or any consideration of how it can enhance students' lives and the lives of those they love; where there is very little encouragement to think about how 'things could be otherwise'; where classrooms discussions are hardly ever lead by notions of how we must take on the responsibility of reducing the unnecessary sufferings of the world or about looking into the future -at what is not yet- and finding ways to empower individuals to take on the role to create a new and perhaps a better world- Imagination is walking dead around our educational institutions not realizing its lifeless. At least the kind of imagination Maxine talks about when she said that "the imagination is the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools” (p. 5).
In this paper, the author will discuss how the revival of the social imagination that Maxine Greene proclaimed 21 years ago in her book Releasing the Imagination might be the only path to changing the social and moral crisis of our times. She will bring forth how this social imagination is the key to connecting critical consciousness and activism in education to bring about the notion that we are all responsible for the pains and sufferings of our world and that relieving it is the responsibility of us all.
It may be the recovery of imagination that lessens the social paralysis we see around us and restores the sense that something can be done in the name of what is decent and humane (Greene 1995, p. 35).

Author

• Yolanda A. Medina, Borough of Manhattan Community College - CUNY