Embodied Imagination as Emancipatory Educational Inquiry

• 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

Embodied Imagination as Emancipatory Educational Inquiry
The author lives in one of the world’s cultural capitals. Nonetheless, New York State is home to the USA’s most segregated state public school system and New York City, the country’s largest public school district is also its third most segregated big city public school system (Fessenden; Kucsera and Orfield). The City is also out of compliance with the State’s mandates for numbers of hours required for all public school students in arts education (Office).
Maxine Greene’s conversations with the author about how his framing of improvisation encouraged her new understanding of how her own scholarly creative writing process was in her estimation guided by principles of improvisation inspired the development of this presentation. Greene’s commitment to social imagination and change is embedded in her work in aesthetic education. “(. . .) 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 35)
The choreographer/writer, director/educator, and dancer/performer is a qualitative-artistic researcher and practicing artist-scholar who will through his improvisational movement performance generate arts-based data at Maxine Greene High School. He will use arts-based methods that expand the definition of research to include embodied imagination (McNiff). The author will also develop movement performance structures grounded in these themes to engage audience participation with non-dancers through guided inquiry and prompts he will provide verbally as part of the 10-to-15-minute improvised performance presentation.
References
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Author

• Mark B. DeGarmo, Mark DeGarmo Dance