Dreaming Unheard Frequencies in Public Education

• In Event: Response Abilities II: Generating Arts-Based Research With Martin Luther King Jr. and Maxine Greene at the Maxine Greene High School for the Arts and Imaginative Inquiry

Abstract

Title: Dreaming Unheard Frequencies in Public Education


It is dreaming and existing that “allows” us to keep making ourselves into beings who fight for liberation. (Freire, 2007, p. xi)
Wide-awakeness [is knowing] what it means to be in the world. (Greene, 1995, p. 35)
Participatory involvement with the many forms of art can enable us to see more in our experience, to hear more of normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed. (Greene, 1995, p. 123)

The words “I have a Dream” have become iconic for many based on Martin Luther Kings’ speech. Dreaming crosses all boundaries, whether personal, political, historical or spiritual. As an artist/researcher/teacher I engage an awake-dream practice as a form of subtle or slow activism (Heim, 2003), to cross boundaries and enter the unfamiliar, the unknown. This has become one way to generate data for my arts-based educational research practice. In my practice I have found there is a great desire in learners, across all ages and settings, for non-rational modes of experience and what Maxine Greene has called “wide-awakeness” in the communal processes of building a contemporary dream culture.

Prior to the performative event/session I will enter an individual awake-dream state/process at The Maxine Greene High School for Imaginative Inquiry in New York City. I will record the dream(s) that emerge and write them into an “involuntary poem” (States, 1988) that I will performatively read at the HS during the session. Following the reading of the poem, space will be given for those present to engage an awake-dream themselves, in response to the involuntary poem as a form of imaginative inquiry that is forefronted at this public school. Thus, allowing “seemingly divided or unfamiliar parts, or even discarded ones, [to dream themselves] into a more complex, interconnected whole” (p. 32).

References

Bogzaran, F. & Delauriers, D. (2012). Integral Dreaming: A holistic approach to dreams. NY, NY:
Suny.

Freire, P. (2007). Daring to dream: Toward a pedagogy of the unfinished. Boulder, CO:
Paradigm.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York, NY:
Teachers College Press.


Heim, W. (2003). Slow activism: Homelands, love and the lightbulb. The
Sociological Review, 183-202.

Author

• Barbara A. Bickel, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale