Greene, Maxine

Positioning herself as an existential-phenomeno-logical educational philosopher throughout her illustrious academic career, Maxine Greene writes, speaks, and teaches about conceptions of freedom, moral choices, and the creation of public spaces that enact possibilities for constructions of just and humane educational communities. Within any contextualization of such communities, Greene argues that engagements with the arts are imperative in the quest for wide-awakeness and that social imagination allows a breaking with the taken-for-granted, a setting aside of familiar definitions and distinctions, a becoming conscious of and responding to diversities of perspectives and identities.

Greene does not situate herself within the field of curriculum studies, per se. However, her vivid and compelling rationale and exemplifications in her own intellectual work of the reasons for doing philosophy influenced and framed efforts to theorize reasons for the field's need to turn away from a technical-rational conception of curriculum and its studies and toward efforts to understand the nature of educational experiences in all their psycho-social dimensions. Greene's own versions of doing philosophy were based in the humanities and incorporated analyses of literature and the arts as means of enacting her visions for education as constant processes of engaging, questioning, choosing, [Page 418]and becoming. During the reconceptualization of the U.S. curriculum field during the 1970s and early and mid-1980s as well in current iterations of her work, Greene's constant drive to do philosophy bolstered and continues to support curriculum theorizing as necessarily including philosophical and theoretical analyses as integral components of the intellectual advancement of the curriculum studies field, writ large.

Greene, born in Brooklyn, New York, earned her doctorate in education from New York University in 1955 and then taught at New York University, Montclair State College, and Brooklyn College. In 1965, she joined the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, the only female among the bastion of male philosophy of education colleagues. She currently holds the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education (emerita) at Teachers College. In 2004, the Teachers College Trustees created the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education.

Among her outstanding and numerous awards and honors, her election to the office of President of the American Educational Research Association (AREA) indicated the high esteem in which her colleagues within the whole diverse field of educational research held her. Indeed, for a predominately social science and quantitative research oriented membership to endorse her AERA presidency is of special note. Greene also was elected president of the Philosophy of Education Society, the American Educational Studies Association, and the Middle Atlantic States Philosophy of Education Society.

Greene also has been awarded the Medal of Honor from Teachers College and Barnard College, Educator of the Year Award from Phi Delta Kappa, the Scholarly Achievement Award from Barnard College, and AERA's Lifetime Achievement Award; and she received a Fulbright fellowship to New Zealand.

As Philosopher-in-Residence of the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education (LCI) since 1976, Greene conducts workshops, especially in literature as art, lectures at LCI's summer sessions, and her intellectual work has inspired the creation of a small high school, the High School of Arts, Imagination and Inquiry in association with LCI and New Visions for Public Schools. She founded the Maxine Greene Foundation for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education in 2003.

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