Maxine Greene Beliefs on Aesthetic Education
One of the topics/concepts that I am interested in is Aesthetic experience and getting students more involved in schools. Specifically on Maxine Greene’s beliefs in aesthetic education which pays more attention to authenticity and allowing students to be themselves. Maxine greene was an american educational philosopher, author, social activist, and teacher. Often being the sole woman presenter at educational philosophy conferences as well as being the first woman president of the Philosophy of Education Society in 1967. Additionally, she was the first woman to preside over the American Educational Research Association in 1981. Through aesthetic education Maxine Greene encourages the use of arts, dance, music, literacy, among other artistic texts as classroom content that could foster learner engagement and could help learners to view their worlds with renewed perspective.
Maxine's ideals of aesthetic education will improve overall service to students while becoming more engaged and better-informed citizens themselves, she integrated existentialism into her pedagogy with three watchwords which is doing, acting and choosing. Maxine’s existential approach to education seems to correlate with principles of existential psychotherapy, helping patients cope with issues most central to human experience. Aesthetic understanding forces us to see and think about the world in very unusual ways and initial attempts in this regard must be received in a nurturing way.
My next steps will be focused on how Maxine Greene implements her concepts into a classroom setting along a few other scholars. One of the Article I will be using for my paper titled, Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Learning Experiences by Uhrmacher, P. Bruce, talks about ways to provide the opportunity for students to have aesthetically engaged learning experiences. The themes, which are elaborated upon fully in this article, include connections, active engagement, sensory experience, perceptivity, risk taking, and imagination.