From the Outside and the Elsewhere: Maxine Greene's Challenging Versions of Social Agency and Vision

• In Event: Dreaming in Greene: Reframing Contemporary Educational Policy, Practice, and Research Through Maxine Greene’s Critical Lens

Abstract

Throughout her life’s work, Maxine Greene’s primary challenge to educators was to confront and work to change circumstances and practices that mitigate against equitable and humane conditions for all. She drew inspiration from Sartre’s contention that humans are responsible for our life-orienting “choices,” especially those that involve acting against inequities:
. . . if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that I might contemplate them coldly, but that I might animate them with my indignation, that I might disclose them . . . as abuses to be suppressed. (Sartre, 1949, pp. 62-63).
Compelled by Sartre’s insistence on choosing to act against “the unbearables,” Maxine conceptualized “social imagination” as one demanding version of social agency as well as potent weapon in fighting all manner of injustices. She conceived “social imagination” as encompassing capacities “to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, on the streets where we live, in our schools” (Greene, 1995, p. 5).
Hardly an illusion or naïve pedagogical mandate or slogan, Maxine argued that social imagination involves believing in possibilities of choosing to directly address inequities and suffering in our societies, in our schools. Social imagination thus also requires, in its largest sense, “the shaping of a social vision; it has to do with the . . . attainment of justice, for instance, of equality, of a decent and humane way of living together” (Greene, 2009, p. 1). Social imagination especially signifies an awareness of and actions in support of
what may seem . . . to be a totally alien world in the person of another; we are called upon to use our imaginations to enter into that world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is. That does not mean that we approve it or even necessarily appreciate it. It does mean that we extend our experience sufficiently to grasp it as a human possibility. (Greene, 1995, p. 4)
Greene’s work commands a social vision and agency that enables educators to attend to those moments when we are moved by something that affects us from “the outside,” from elsewhere, from the lives of others. In light of current harrowing threats to the very existence of public education and its specific commitments to multiply diverse enactments of “human possibilities,” I examine how Maxine’s vision of “social imagination” can continue to spur education researchers’ work toward equitable and humane educative opportunities for all.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University