ABSTRACT
In Releasing the Imagination, Maxine Greene evokes a passion for education, the arts, and social change as she shares her journey ‘to look through the others’ eyes more than I would have and to imagine being something more than I have come to be’ (1995a, p. 86). Maxine Greene is a prophetic voice challenging educators and students-indeed all persons-to connect the arts with lived experience for the purpose of opening ‘spaces where persons speaking together and being together can discover what it signifies to incarnate and act upon values far too often taken for granted’ (1995a, p. 68). Greene envisions classrooms and communities that value multiple perspectives, democratic pluralism, life narratives, and ongoing social change. This is best accomplished, she believes, through literary, artistic, and phenomenological experiences that release the imagination. She challenges the anxiety of a modern world that has reduced learning and living to fragmented and quantifiable components devoid of the aesthetic and narrative. Greene (1995a) summarizes:
I have written Releasing the Imagination to remedy that anxiety. It grants a usefulness to the disinterest of seeing things small at the same time that it opens to and validates the passion for seeing things close up and large. For this passion is the doorway for imagination; here is the
possibility of looking at things as if they could be otherwise. This possibility, for me, is what restructuring might signify. Looking at things large is what might move us on to reform. (p. 16)
The possibility of creating a passion for looking at things anew and opening a doorway for imagination, education, and social reform is Maxine Greene’s constant theme in the 1990s.
