Greene Thoughts in a Green Shade: Being Eco-Politically Alive, Awake, Curious, and Often Furious

• 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

Greene Thoughts in a Green Shade: Being ecopoetically alive, awake, curious, and often furious

Purposes: The works of the late philosopher, arts educator (and former AERA President) Maxine Greene continue to offer courage, inspiration, fresh energy and insights to educators. New generations encounter Greene’s lifelong willingness to take artistic and pedagogical risks, engage with the world as it is and embrace the unknown. At the Maxine Greene High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, within the Martin Luther King Jr. complex, we have an ideal site to explore of the thoughts of Drs. Greene and King, in relation to contemporary issues that wake us, make us curious and sometimes furious.

This interactive performance will focus on ecopoetic approaches to improvisational poetry. Paradoxically, the site of this school for arts and imagination is a very human-built landscape, with little growing or green about it. We will seek out those living green spaces and connect extemporaneous oral poetry with the work of these great educators and community leaders, in the context of living ecologies manifest within our schools.

Theoretical framework: Ecopoetic practices (Bryson, 2005; Tarlo, 2009; Retallack, 2003) engage us in complex relations of the human and more-than-human world. Ecopoetics acknowledges dialogues among entities of the living world, in our age of deep environmental concerns. We listen to self and world by engaging senses, intellect, visceral connections with place, and resonances with language.

Students and teachers might dream of ‘green thoughts in a green shade’ (Marvell, 1681/2005) and find solace in more naturalized places. But here, concrete and brick are omnipresent. How can learners awaken deep connections with the world, and joy in their own and others’ stories, in places where much of the other-than-human world has been excluded? What were Greene’s ideas about a connection to place and the world beyond the human? How can we address Greene’s radically democratic, aesthetic and experimental spirit in our age of environmental crisis?

Greene wrote about empathetic poetic and social imagination, through which we can experience the world imaginatively via experiences of the Other, human and other-than-human (Greene, 1995). Greene’s thoughts do address green thoughts, if obliquely – and this is what we will explore.

Methods & Results: Author and participants will generate and perform multivocal collaborative works in response to Greene and MLK, based in the particularities of the site. Through this communal ecopoetry experience, participants may connect with struggles they face in their own practice.

Scholarly significance: Ecopoetics provides new, integrative ways for educators to work collaboratively to bring awareness, hope and empathy to work in ecojustice in education.

References:
Bryson, J. S. (2005). The west side of any mountain. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Marvell, A. (1681/2005). The garden. In E. S. Donno (Ed.), The complete poems (of Marvell). London: Penguin.
Retallack, J. (2003). The poethical wager. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tarlo, H. (2009). Recycles: The eco-ethical poetics of found text in contemporary poetry. Journal of Ecocriticism 1(2), 114-130.

Author

• Susan Gerofsky, The University of British Columbia