ABSTRACT
In the contemporary moment that is increasingly characterized by what she called "the passive gaze that is the hallmark of our time", Maxine Greene's pedagogy of social imagination needs to be echoed, enlarged, and acted upon. Her work keenly addresses the need to develop "wide-awakeness" necessary to stave off what Henry Giroux calls the "disimagination machine". Susan Jean Mayer illustrates the ways that Greene extends John Dewey's work on social commitment and individuality into academic subfields of teacher education, autobiography, and the arts. Both Dewey and Greene "focused on the need to nurture students' imaginations, which they identified as the essential engine of all new thinking". Throughout her work, Greene drew from novelists such as Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison and poets such as Emily Dickenson and Wallace Stevens, to argue that reading literature engages learners' imaginations and encourages them to imagine "as-if".
