Well, I think I may have found a new role model in Maxine Greene. Seriously, what a lady. Born in 1917, Greene managed to get  a BA in American history and philosophy in 1938 (not super common for women back then), and went on to get a masters, then PhD in the male-dominated field of educational psychology from NYU in 1955. Among other things, she was the first female president of the Philosophy of Education Society, and the first woman to preside over the American Educational Research Association. She has taught social philosophy, philosophy and history of education, literature, writing, and aesthetics. She now heads the Maxine Greene Foundation to support the arts and education.

Of the many, many ideas and philosophies Dr. Greene has developed in her career, I’d like to focus on just two. These are the two that struck me most as I read about her, so please don’t consider this in any way a thorough account of her work.

The first idea that I loved was that of one of her books, Teacher as Stranger (1973). The main idea, according to Greene is to “suggest that the stranger’s vision brought a kind of acuity unlikely to be found in a person whose vision was dulled by familiarity. In effect, I was asking the teacher to take the view of the critical onlooker, someone attentive to inequities, false pieties, groundless promises.” Basically, she challenged teachers to continually question the material they taught, and to keep themselves from becoming dulled to the information they imparted. I love this idea, that we as teachers should remain almost uncomfortable with the material in order to always look at it critically and with fresh eyes.

This leads me to the second idea that I loved – the role of the teacher in cultivating what Greene calls “wide-awakeness” in students. Part of our job is to teach our students that the possibility of learning is everywhere and that we have only to engage fully in the world and in our interactions with others to start seeing it. I only hope that I can someday cultivate that in my students!