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MAXINE’S TABLE: CONNECTING ACTION WITH IMAGINATION IN

THE THOUGHT OF MAXINE GREENE AND HANNAH ARENDT Teresa Wilson

Department of Integrated Studies in Education McGill University

INTRODUCTION

“Hannah Arendt has told a story about some former members of the French Resistance who felt that they had ‘lost their treasure’ when the war was over and they returned to ordinary life, ” recounts Maxine Greene, drawing on one of her favorite examples from Arendt’s writings.’ The “ treasure” signified their perception of themselves as challengers, individuals who seized the initiative and resisted systems of oppression to open a public space for freedom (TPR, 35).2 This particular Arendt story comes from her reading of Rene Char, a poet who fought for the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France and later wrote about his experi- ences. Perhaps Arendt was drawn to Char’s tale because of its similarities to her own life story - that of a woman who fled Germany, became a refugee, eventually emigrated to the United States, and then dedicated herself largely to exploring answers to “the problem of evil” in politics. Greene’s interest in Arendt’s story about Char derives from her commitment to the idea of teachers’ resisting conformity by becoming initiators, or challengers: “I want to see teachers become challengers and take the initiative upon themselves. As they do so, as we do so, there will emerge a ‘public space’ where personal reality can be at last affirmed” (TPR, 35, emphasis in original).

I read Arendt long before encountering Greene’s writings. In reading Greene, I noticed the degree to which she relies on Arendt, and how both women’s writings gravitate around the same two issues: [ 1 ) public spaces and ( 2 ) the threat thoughtless- ness poses to constituting such spaces. I also noticed that Greene does not depend on Arendt for any strictly educational ideas; if anything, their views on education are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Arendt wrote two essays directly on education: one showed a strongly conservative bent, arguing that educators have a responsibility to carry tradition forward through the teaching of young children; the other essay, which became mired in political controversy, used the Little Rock desegregation crisis to argue against racial integration in schools on the grounds that it cannot be socially mandated - schools cannot dictate whom children’s (and children’s

1. Maxine Greene, ”Teaching: The Question of Personal Reality,” Teachers College Record 80, no. 1 (1978): 34. This article will be cited as TPR in the text for all subsequent references. 2. Greene adopts the word ”challenger” from Arendt; see Hannah Arendt, Between Past andFuture [New York, Viking Penguin, 1961),4. This book will be cited as BPF in the text for all subsequent references.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Spring 2003 / Volume 53 / Number 2 0 2003 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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parents’) friends should be.3 Despite her frequent citations of Arendt, Greene passes over these essays in virtual silence. Why would someone so passionately concerned with the inclusion of the social and political within schools turn to Arendt for insight on contemporary educational issues when Arendt’s specifically educational writings seem so distant from - even antithetical to - Greene‘s concerns? The answer, I believe, lies in the wider common ground between Greene and Arendt - that is, the importance both writers, though almost a generation apart, ascribe to the link between public spaces and thoughtles~ness.~

While Arendt developed this link in the context of understanding the practice of judgment, Greene explores the role the imagination plays in illuminating public spaces. Just before her death, Arendt began developing an argument that tied judgment to imagination. Greene further explored this territory by reflecting on the inlspensable role of the imagination in creating public spaces. In her personal and pedagogical explorations of the importance of literature and the arts to education, Greene has become one of the strongest advocates for connecting imagination with the opening of public spaces in classrooms.

PUBLIC SPACES AND THE CREATION OF A COMMON WORLD Greene announces that her quest is “to find (or create) an authentic public space,

that is, one in which diverse human beings can appear before one another.”5 In continually returning to Arendt’s example of Rene Char, who immortalized his experience as a Resistance fighter when he wrote, “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament, ” Greene draws attention to the significance of politics to classrooms and schools.6 Politics is understood, on a fundamental level, as the ability to act and choose; for teachers politics is the choice to challenge themselves actively as learners instead of falling into routine actions.

Arendt interpreted Char’s phrase as meaning that the events he experienced were unprecedented; they interrupted an otherwise ordinary existence. When the political coalitions within the French legislature collapsed, and the puppet Vichy administration was set up, the French Resistance filled the gap, constituting a parallel “public realm” in which the country’s political affairs were “transacted in

3. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,“ Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45-56; and Hannah Arendt, ”The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future, 173-196. See also Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). 4. Aaron Schutz has written on the common ground between Arendt and Greene on the subject of “public spaces”; however, his argument pursues a different direction than mine. See Aaron Schutz, ”Creating Local ’Public Spaces’ in Schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene,” Curriculum Inquiry 29, no. l(1999): 77-98.

5. Maxine Greene, Dialectic of FIeedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 19881, xi. This book will be cited as DF in the text for all subsequent references.

6. Char’s aphorism is one of 237 collected under the title, “Leaves of Hypnos: A War Journal (1943-1944)” in Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose of Rend Char, trans. and ed. Jackson Mathews [New York: Random House, 19561, 108.

TERESA WILSON is Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education at McGill University, 3700 McTavish St., Montreal, Que H3A 1Y2. Her primary areas of scholarship are diversity issues in literacy and teacher education and critical approaches to theory and pedagogy of literature instruction.

WILSON Maxine’s Table 205

deed and word” (BPF, 3 ). When Germany was defeated, those who participated in the Resistance were “thrown back into the irrelevance of their personal affairs“ (BPF, 4); in a phrase that Arendt echoed from Char and that Greene in turn echoes from Arendt, the fighters returned to the “sad opaqueness” of “a private life centered about nothing but itself” (BPF, 4).7

Char spoke of the time of the Resistance as his “treasure” and of its disappear- ance as his “lost treasure” [BPF, 4).* Greene recalls the 1960s and early 1970s as her “treasure, ” that is, a time when “people took initiatives, became challengers, and embarked on new beginnings” (RI, 2). People today, Greene argues, need to reinstate that progressive vision and resist the “thoughtlessness, banality, technical rational- ity, [and] carelessness ... that now undermine public education at every turn” [RI, 2). Greene’s interest in freely constituted public spaces precedes her first use of Arendt (in 1973), demonstrating that the two ideas around which their subsequent work would gravitate were generated inde~endently.~ Greene became interested in the phenomenon of freely constituted public spaces within the history of education. In her first book, Greene claims that the public school, even though we think of it as an indelible feature of the American landscape, was initially a controversial under- taking. Ideas for establishing a common space, a “common school,” for educating the general population were circulating in various pockets around the country. These ”experiments,” as Greene identifies them, were tried with varying degrees of success. One example she provides is the adult education movement - that is, “The American Lyceum” and the local institutes and lecture groups that followed from it - dating from 1820 to the late 1830s. The movement, which had “popular

~

7. For Greene’s discussion of this experience, see Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995),2. This book will be cited as RI in the text for all subsequent references. The word “citizen” took on very ddferent meanings during and after the French Resistance. During the Resistance, ordinary people filled the gap left by the French government by constituting a public realm through their collective and indwidual acts of resistance. These same individuals experienced a feeling of irrelevance after the war. For more on t h s subject, see Martin Blumenson, The Vilde Affair: Beginnings o f the French Resistance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977); and Frida Knight, The French Resistance, 1940-1 944 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975). 8. What was Rent Char’s involvement in the Resistance? Unlike a host of writers who published underground during the Nazi occupation, Char was recruited into the French army. As Eric Marty noted, “ R e d Char est l’un des rares po”tes ou intellectuals a avoir effectivement et efficacement, comrne principal responsable de la zone sud de la France, combattu, les arrnes f la main, l‘occupation allemande” [”As the person responsihle for the Southern region of France, Ren& Char is one of those rare poets or intellectuals to have effec.tively taken up arms against the German occupation.”]; see Marty, Rend Char (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 19901, 167. Many French writers chose to resist through their writing as resistance; see Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Poetics and Narrative Forms, 1940-1 950 (Manches- ter: Manchester University Press, 1989). Char, on the other hand, believed that, while poetry informs and precedespoliticalaction, their aimscancomeintoconflict: “touteactionquise justifiedoit-tre.. .une action proposable de refus et rksistance, inspirCe par une poCsie en avant et souvcnt en dispute avec elle” [”All justifiable action must.. .admit of the possibility of refusal or resistance. Such action is often inspired by poetry but is also often in conflict with it” (that is, one cannot be a poet and an actor, in the political sense, at one and same time).] (Rene Char, “Reponses Interrogatives f une question de Martin Heidegger, RCcherchC de la Base et du Sommet,” [“Provocative Replies to a Question of Martin Heidegger’s Investigated from Top to Bottom”] 734-735, 736; cited in Marty, Rend Char, 171). Only after the war did Char resume publishing. 9. Maxine Greene, Teacher us Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1973). This book will be cited as TS in the text for all subsequent references.

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enlightenment” as its objective, “rose like a groundswell,” and its meetings invari- ably turned to discussing the creation of common schools. In Greene’s view, these discussions demonstrate how people in the Midwest “wantedvicarious involvement with the larger world, the world they had left; they ached for alleviation of barren life routines.”1° We forget, Greene explains, that the school controversy was “about the validity of the claim that a community of common men could be created in an open world - and that it could survive.””

Greene’s insights echo the scholarly work of educational historians and ethnog- raphers, such as Shirley Brice Heath, who have documented how Western literacy emerged out of the formation of literate communities. While many of these communities were exclusive in membership, some of them introduced an unac- countably new element into education - for example, women’s creation of literary clubs for themselves and other disfranchised g r 0 ~ p s . l ~ According to Greene, political literacy results from people’s “intersubjectivity, their coming together” so ”that they can invent projects for transformation, for re-invention of some aspect of the

Greene links this intersubjective action to persons discovering “their lost spontaneity” and “their own voices,” and thus the “treasure” of who they are.14

Greene and Arendt agree on the role of initiative in creating new public spaces, with Greene dlrectly incorporating a number of Arendt’s central ideas, such as plurality, the ”in-between,” and the link between action and “who” a person is. However, a hermeneutical distance exists between the two writers, with Greene inclining toward a more postmodern framework. Arendt, who remained uninter- ested in the labels others ascribed to her, has often been called politically conserva- tive. It would be useful to examine how each author develops the idea of a “public space,” specifically analyzing how Greene’s perception of the classroom as a public space challenges Arendt’s narrower notion, which excluded schools and classrooms from the political realm.

ARENDT

Arendt divided the vita activa, or life of activity (as opposed to the vita contemplativa J, into three aspects: labor, work, and action. Labor, which takes place within a cycle of birth and death and is tied to survival, consists in the relentless repetition of tasks whose outcomes are consumed so that life can ~0nt inue. l~ Work

10. Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision: The Search for American Education and Literature (New York: Random House, 1965), 49. 1 1 . Ibid., 4.

12. See, for example, Shirley Brice Heath, “The Sense of Being Literate: Historical and Cross-cultural Features,” in Handbook of Reading Research, vol. 2, eds. Michael Kamil, Peter Mosenthal, P. David Pearson, and Rebecca Barr (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 4-7.

13. Maxine Greene, “Toward Possibility: Expanding the Range of Literacy,” English Education 18, no. 4 [ 1986): 242. 14. Ibid., 241. 15. The ideas discussed in t h s section have been condensed from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). This book will be cited as HC in the text for all subsequent references.

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is the specialty of homo fuber, who makes things that can endure beyond a human lifespan and that collectively constitute a society. The third aspect, action, is what sets humans apart from beasts, according to Arendt. Action is linked to natality. Both action and natality erupt out of nowhere into the web of human relations and begin something new: ”The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world” (HC, 178). A ”newcomer” is someone who has come into the world through birth or as if through birth, through the initiating power of human action (HC, 177).

Arendt distinguished between “who” and “what” a person is. “Who” refers to the duimon, or spirit, that a person reveals through speech and action. The “what“ consists in ”qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings” individuals can show or hide (HC, 179). The “who” is implicit in whatever we do and can only be discerned by others: “its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who’ in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities” (HC, 179). When individuals meet as “what” they are (in a workplace meeting, for example), the “who” is present but hidden, subsumed within role expectations. When individuals come together as ”who” they are, they are fulfilling what Arendt called the human condition of “plurality”: “the basic condi- tion of both action and speech” (HC, 175). Human plurality is characterized by equality and distinction: “If men were not equal, they could not understand one another or those who came before them. If men were not distinct, they would need neither speech nor action to communicate. Through speech and action, men distinguish themselves” (HC, 1 76).16

The “public” world is constituted through appearances. “Public” signifies two things. First, it means that ”everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody’’ and that “appearance.. .constitutes reality.” By appearance, Arendt meant the world that is common, or ”in-between” us: “TO live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (HC, 52). Second, the meaning of public life derives “from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position”(HC, 57). Despite this variety of perspectives, however, “everybody is always concerned with the same object” (HC, 57-58). Arendt was not saying that reality is made up of a patchwork of differing perspectives; rather, she maintained that reality is confirmed by perspectives that disclose a common object. The object is prior to the participants, not in that it is actually there before they arrive, but in the sense that it is a given of what Arendt called the political or public realm: ”The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” (HC, 50).

16. In an informal debate at the University of Toronto, Arendt fielded concerns that her notion of the political is exclusionary and that it excludes precisely those social factors - race, gender, class - that condition “who” can appear in the world. For more on this, see Hannah Arendt, “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt,” inHannah Arendt: TheRecoveryofthe Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 301339.

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GREENE

For Greene, the public space is an in-between brought into being through the concerted actions of distinct human beings who are related by a common purpose. This is the message that Norm Fruchter, one of Greene’s former students, garnered from her university classes: “Maxine introduced us to the notion of public space as the terrain on which citizens could come together to discuss and debate how to advance the common good.”17 Greene concurs with Arendt that to be distinctively human is to act. To act is to begin something, to set something in motion whose consequences cannot be foreseen. Greene ties this notion of action as initiation to the concepts of choice, authenticity, and possibility within education: “Action signifies beginnings or the taking of initiativesj and, in education, beginnings must be thought possible if authentic learning is expected to occur” (DF, 22). To be human is to choose, and to act on that choosing is to elect to be an “I.” An ”I” is present in word and deed, even though Greene believed that self-presence is necessarily contingent and partial.IR

The public space, also known as the space of appearances, is so called because we appear to one another in our distinctness, as “who” rather than “what” we are. Greene consistently honors Arendt’s distinction between the “who” and the ”what”: ”Hannah Arendt once wrote about the importance of diverse persons speaking to one another as ‘who’ and not ‘what’ they are and, in so doing, creating an ’in-between’ among themselves” (RZ, 39). Notice that Greene uses “diverse” rather than “dis- tinct“ (Arendt’s term) here. Greene often substitutes “diverse“ or “different” for the term “distinct,” thus conflating Arendt’s distinction between the political and the social. Arendt argued that it is as political beings (distinct and equal] that we enter the public realm.

Greene sees newcomers as youth but also as minorities, those who have been excluded from appearing in the political realm because of their social identity as women or as cultural and racial minorities. Creene’s concern for social issues informs her interest in the creation of public spaces: “There are always strangers, people with their own cultural memories, with voices aching to be heard. They have always been coming; they are still coming from the ravaged places, the police states, the camps, the war-torn streets’’ (DF, 87). While Arendt also acknowledged that the “new” will come from immigrants (she herself played this role in coming to a nation of immigrants), Greene focuses on those who have been here but have been excluded.’g

~

17. Norm Fruchter, ”Pursuing Public Space: Maxine Greene and the Sameness in Utter Diversity,” in A Light in Dark Times, eds. William C. Ayers and Janet L. Miller (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 229.

18. Maxine Greene, “Difference, Inclusion, and the Ethical Community: Moving Beyond Relativism,” in Multidimensional Aspects of Literacy Research, Theory, and Practice, eds. Charles K. Kinzer and Donald J. Leu (Chicago: National Reading Conference, 1994),28-39. This article will be cited as DI in the text for all subsequent references. 19. Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” 175.

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Arendt’s “common,” though it arises from the unexpected, grants a permanence to the world that she claimed we recognize as stable reality. Greene uses Arendt’s phrase “the common” to denote something that ”becomes multiplex and endlessly challenging, as each person reaches out from his/her own ground toward what might be, should be, is not yet” (DF, 21). As a postmodern theorist, Greene is more interested in how realities and identities can be constructed and enlarged ”so that we all become different, that we all engage in a dialectic to reach beyond where we are” (RI, 110). Through this process, we “discover together against the diversity of our backgrounds” so as to ”create Arendt’s in-between” (RI, 119). The table, though functioning as an “in-between,” shifts not only according to the multiple perspec- tives of those who come to sit at it, but the table itself moves as the multiple perspectives brought to it participate in a continual process of becoming - that is, of being moved and moving to new perspectives through listening and responding to others’ narratives. The common space, then, is not a place of appearance and disclosure as being but of appearance and disclosure as becoming.

Greene, as an educational theorist, is most concerned with the public spaces within education - especially schools and classrooms. She frequently calls schools and classrooms “public spaces.” She also interchanges the terms ”small” and “local” with “public” with the intention of suggesting that these spaces, though localized, count as public spaces.20 The perception of classroom and school as public, or common, spaces has been acquiring currency, ironically partly through the distilla- tion of Arendt‘s ideas into educational theory and practice.2’ I would argue that this shift represents a recognition of the broader role that schools and teachers perform, and have historically performed, in maintaining as well as criticizing society. Arendt claimed that the school ought to shelter children from the world until such time as they become mature enough to participate as equals within the political realm: “Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated” (BPF, 177). In contrast, M’hammed Mellouki and Clermont Gauthier have suggested that teachers are “public intellectuals” whose influence is as great as public intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, yet whose impact is obscured because of the location of their intellectual endeavors: the

20. Maxine Greene, “Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings,” Teachers College Record 95, no. 2 (1993): 218.

21. For example, Nicholas Burbules and Thomas Callister, Jr., argue for the creation of Internet communi- ties as “common spaces” in education; see Burbules and Callister, “What Kind of Community Can the Internet Be?” in Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies for Education (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), 153-182. Creatingpublicspaces in educationisusuallyalignedwith acall for democratic classrooms, as in Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Linda C . Powell, ”Communities of Difference: A Critical Look at Desegregated Spaces Created for and by Youth,” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 2 (1997): 253; Michael Rose, “Introduction,“ in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995); and Carolyn Shields, “Learning from Difference: Considerations for Schools as Communities,” Curriculum Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2000): 291. William Pinar sees the task of the “new century” as “the intellectual formation of a public sphere in education” -a task that is connected with “a resuscitation of the progressive project in which we renew and perform our commitment to the democratization of American society”; see Pinar, ”The Researcher as Bricoleur: The Teacher as Public Intellectual,” Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 4 (2001): 698.

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neighborhood Unlike Arendt, Greene supports the idea that teachers need to recognize that they are involved within a public sphere, especially since the educational system disguises this fact by encouraging teachers to identify with the role defined for them as “functionaries” within a system (01, 28).

Even though Greene’s use of public space is philosophically distinct from Arendt‘s in several respects, the two authors’ thinking is tied together by an important thread of continuity: the way in which both authors link becoming “challengers” with imagination, or a faculty akin to imagination. For Arendt, the faculty of judging is paramount, but this faculty is tied to imagination. Greene sees imagination as critical to a capacity to envision possibilities other than the one given. This link between imagination and action is explored in the following sections.

THOUGHTLESSNESS AND PUBLIC SPACES

In Teacher as Stranger, Greene specifies what she means by thoughtlessness in teaching. She begins by asking what it is that we as teachers are inducting students into: If a society is sick, unjust, and inequitable, she asks, echoing William Blake, what right have we as educators to bring students out of innocence and into experience? Before 1973 Greene answers this question by asserting that the public school “is the effort of a community to recreate itself with the rise of each new generation and to perpetuate itself in historic time” (TS, 3).13 In her subsequent writings, Greene increasingly emphasizes the centrality of teachers to the commu- nity, begmning with herself: “I want to believe that my own seeking and the seeking, the becoming of many persons I know have fundamentally to do with orienting us to some conception, perhaps a common conception, of the good and the right” (DI, 31-32). Greene adopts Albert Camus’s metaphor of “the plague” to show how actions, and the perspective informing those actions, influence the kind of society we inhabit: “The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone [with the plague], is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention,’ (01, 33].24 In an argument that evokes Arendt’s work on the banality of evil, Greene maintains that the antithesis to being present is when teachers behave as “clerksf’ (TS, 5). Greene hopes to connect her “own seeking” as a teacher educator “with the strivings of other teachers and teacher educators who are weary of being clerks or technocrats and equally weary,” says Greene, echoing Arendt’s Char, “of that sad opaqueness of a private life centered about nothing but itself” (RI, 2). Drawing on Arendt, Greene specifies that in education, as in all things, “to be ethical is to think what we are doing“ (DI, 35). But what does it mean to think what we are doing in education?

Greene’s answer is that teachers need to be provoked into “a heightened sense of agency” by being connected to their life-worlds and by being encouraged to “recover their own landscapesN (RI, 48). Who or what provides that provocation?

22. M‘hammed Mellouki and Clermont Gauthier, ”L’enseignant, un intellectuel” [”The Teacher, an Intellectual”] (paper presented at the twenty-ninth annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Lava1 University, Quebec City, Quebec, May 2001). 23. See also Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision. 24. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1955).

WILSON Maxine’s Table 2 1 1

Without providing any blueprints, Greene explains that “we have to be there in the first person ... eager to tell our stories and listen to others, eager to attend to the changing culture’s story in which so many narratives intermesh” (DI, 37). The provocation comes from within the individual but an individual aware of others and of the impact of self on others.

Greene avoids the philosophical issue of whether evil is a presence or an absence - an issue that Arendt explored. Greene rarely invokes the word “evil.“ Actually, despite the interpretations of some scholars, Arendt herself denied that she ever claimed there is an Eichmann in all of us.25 She specified that “in reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” she used the phrase “banality of evil” not to establish a “theory or doctrine,” but instead to describe ”something quite factual.“26 Neverthe- less, Richard J. Bernstein has traced a continuous movement in Arendt’s thought from absolute evil to radical evil to the banality of evi1.I’ Greene finds Camus’s metaphor of the plague so useful because she believes that, if ”evil” exists at all, it is more like a sickness, and sicknesses can be cured. The cure, as in Camus’s novel, is for individuals to become actively involved with others in finding a cure. Greene is thus able to do something very interesting and insightful with the assumed philosophical absence within thoughtlessness, a move that reclaims ”Eichmann” as a pedagogical lesson for teachers reflecting on their own personal landscapes and how these landscapes influence teaching. Later I will develop the argument that, in reclaiming an account of thoughtlessness for pedagogy, Greene draws depth and insight from her combining of literary sources with phenomenology and existential- ism. First, though, I will show how Arendt’s notion of judgment serves as a step along the way in Greene’s thinking about the connection between thought and action in education.

JUDGMENT AND IMAGINATION

In a lesser-known essay that Greene cites in Teacher as Stranger, Arendt developed the argument that “non-thinking” is an avoidance of thought, specifically of the kind of thinking that involves debate, whether public or inward; it is the inward debate that Arendt, citing Socrates, focused on (TMC, 437). The unthinking person behaves as if ”asleep”: “they get used to never making up their minds’’ because they rely on others to do their thinking for them, and they find it easy to switch from one code of conduct or game of rules to another as long as an authority tells them to (TMC, 436). A thinking person, by contrast, continually engages in an invisible dialogue with himself or herself but does so by withdrawing from the world into the solitude of dialogue. According to Arendt, this dialogue only becomes

25. Arendt, ”Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt,” 308.

26. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38, no. 3 [ 1971): 41 7. This article will be cited as TMC in the text for all subsequent references. 27. For Arendt’s “banality of evil” argument, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmunn in 1erusulern (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Of all the areas of investigation into Arendt’s scholarship, this thesis of hers has attracted the most attention and debate by far. See Richard J. Bernstein, ”Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, eds. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 127-146.

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political and dangerous to conservative elements in society when that “purging element” within thinking becomes public and threatens to expose “the implications of unexamined opinions” (TMC, 446). The bridge between the solitude of thought and the public world is provided by judgment, which shows itself as “the most political of men’s mental abilities” (TMC, 446).

Not long before she died, Arendt delivered a lecture on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Tuudgment. The lecture portended what her entire argument about thinking and judging might have been; portions of it are reprinted in the second book of her two volume set, The Life of the Mind2* The first two volumes addressed the concepts of “thinking” and “willing”; “judging” was to have been the focus of the third volume. Arendt had first argued in 1964 that those who blame the German people for Nazism are presupposing “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and intent whenever the occasion How likely is it, asked Arendt, that “a feeling for such things” could have been already instilled in the German people? In an essay published more than a decade later, Arendt developed her argument in a different direction, arguing that thinking influences judgment and informs action.30

Pursuing the educational implications of Arendt’s 1964 argument, Greene contends that, when teachers teach, they are also engaged in judging (“there must be teaching if persons are to judge”); in the absence of this experience, “how is the teacher to cultivate ’a feeling for such things’?. . .How does a person know when he is right?” (TS, 233). In the book following Teacher as Stranger, Greene develops this argument further, saying that teachers learn against the background of their lived experience, a phenomenological and literary process captured in the phrase “land- scapes of learning,” which appropriately became the book‘s tit1ee3’ Instead of continuing to usekendt’s language of “judging,,, Greene turns to the language of the imagination to articulate how teachers can learn. Literature and the arts can help teachers cultivate a sense of moral agency. If thoughtlessness - the antithesis of imagination - “often overtakes us when we become in some dread way unimagina- tive, unable or unwilling to put ourselves in others’ shoes, incapable of imagining (as Cynthia Ozick puts it) ‘the familiar heart of the stranger,”’ thoughtfulness resides in the imagination and the works of the imagination, in perceiving

Arendt also developed this link between imagination and action to some extent. Imagination has an affinity with judging that Arendt called thinking’s “liberating effect”(TMC, 446). Judging allows the invisibility of thinking to realize itself and

28. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mmd, vol. 2 (New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). 29. Hannah Arendt, “WhoIsGuilty-Manorthe System?” Current(December, 1964): 55. CitedinGreene, Teacher as Stranger, 233. 30. See Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” for this argument.

31. Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978). This book will be cited as LL in the text for all subsequent references.

32. Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory [New York: Knopf, 1989), 283. Cited in Greene, “Difference, Inclusion, and the Ethical Community,” 29.

WILSON Maxine‘s Table 21 3

make itself “manifest in the world of appearances,’‘ and this becomes especially important ”when the chips are down” and a person needs to be able to tell right from wrong and act accordingly, as in the German situation (TMC, 446). The lecture on judging also shows Arendt looking for a philosophical ground on which to connect judgment with the imagination. Quoting directly from Kant, she said imagination is an “enlargement of the mind” that consists in ”comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.”33 Kant’s language reverberates nicely with Greene’s. However, given her interest in the imagination, Greene develops the link between an aesthetic and literary imagination, on the one hand, and a social and political thoughtfulness, on the other, more fully than did Arendt.

IMAGINATION AND ACTION Greene has connected engagement in literature and the arts with an increased

capacity to “tap all sorts of circuits in reader consciousness,’’ which in turn can develop a social conscience and sense of responsibility: ”We see; we hear; we make connections” (RI, 186). Conversely, by opening our teaching practice to probing questions, we are led ‘‘on more and more far-reaching quests” into a world conceived within the literary mode of the possible IN, 187). Imagination, in providing us with a vision for change, also endows us with ”courage“ (RI, 198).

The fact that Greene turns to literature and the arts for a “model” of thoughtful- ness is unusual within education. John Dewey initiated philosophical inquiry into reflective practice by arguing that thinking is provoked within a “forked-road situation’! and that good thinking habits are cultivated through following, rather than avoiding, doubt in seeking a resolution to the problem.34 Donald Schon’s model of reflection-in-action has been instrumental in developing the role of reflective practice in teaching; this research has typically involved creating models for preservice teacher education.35 Another approach taken by some scholars involves developing the idea of phronesis in educational practice and specifically the notion of aphronimos (a person who practices phronesis). This research rests on exploring moral philosophical issues through the application of Aristotle’s writings on ethics to teaching practice.36 Greene does not invoke this philosophical tradition. She often uses the word “reflection” but in a phenomenological context to describe teachers becoming aware of their personal landscapes. Perhaps Greene’s most significant contribution is how she invests the literary experience with the language of

33. Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof [udgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York Harfner, 1951). Citedinkendt, The Life of the Mind, 257.

34. John Dewey, How W e Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (Boston: D.C. Heath, 19331, 14.

35. DonaldSchon, The Reflective Practitioner: HowProfessionals Thinkin Action (New York: BasicBooks, 1983 ); and Kenneth Zeichner, “Alternative Paradigms of Teacher Education,” lournal of Teacher Education 34, no. 3 (1983): 3-9.

36. David Coulter and John R. Wiens, “Educational Judgment: Linking the Actor and the Spectator,” Educationa~Researcher31, no. 4 (2002): 15-25; and JosephDunne, Bock to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

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phenomenology and existentialism, thus connecting imagination with action, the stories we read with those we create in the living of our lives.

One of Greene’s earliest literary essays - a paper in which she wrestles with New Critical modes of literary explication - serves as an example of this process. New Criticism, the dominant mode of literary explication from the 1930s to the 1960s’ was marked by a focus on the aesthetic unity of a text; the artifact’s meaning was enclosed within the text, and the purpose of criticism was to decode that meaning by deciphering the clues. This form of criticism was peculiarly suited to the study of poetry. Another central argument of New Criticism was that literature and life are distinct. The New Critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley drew attention to two fallacies plaguing the study of English literature. Thelogical fallacy consists in assuming that fiction could be actually true, while the affective fallacy involves projecting one’s own feelings onto the literary work.37 In this early essay, Greene struggles with New Criticism’s dichotomies as she attempts to explain how the “toads, Grecian urns, or faces in a crowd” feel real yet are literary and therefore cannot be real toads, urns, or faces. She concludes that, although the toads in poems are not real toads, poets are “literalists of the imagination” who make us feel as if their toads are Her explanation is not entirely convincing, however, until she turns to reader-response theory to introduce a phenomenological element to her interpretation.

Reader-response theory constituted a direct challenge to New Criticism. Like Louise Rosenblatt, who has been credited with legitimizing reader response, Greene believes that literature’s purpose is primarily social. Literature can help to ”combat meaninglessness” by inducing feelings in the reader. Those feelings do not come out of nowhere but are analogous to the feelings of poets, who know which “particulars” to choose because of the “emotions that pulled at them, separated them from the density of things, and made them part of a new order.”39 The reader becomes aware of this sense of significance, which is not only literary but has a social basis. In her 1978 book The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Rosenblatt developed the notion that the literary experience is an aesthetic or lived-through experience to explain both the role of emotion in literary response and the function of the reader in creating meaning in conjunction with the text. This represents a departure from her earlier work (such as her 1938 book Literature and Exploration) in which Rosenblatt focused on the reader’s role within a social context of literary response, investigating how dialogue in classroom situations can shape readers’ experiences and encouraging critical examination of those responses. Scholars have criticized Rosenblatt for abandoning her emphasis on the social dimensions of response and moving toward an aesthetic

37. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).

38. Maxine Greene, “Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens,” Teachers College Record 66, no. 5 [ 1965): 420.

39. hid.

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and more purely literary analysis of response in her later Greene, on the other hand, maintains a steady focus on the social aspect of literary response, thus forging the link between life and art, action and imagination. She does so in two ways.

First, through drawing from phenomenological influences, Greene argues for a connection between the lived-through aesthetic experience and the living of a life. The one is grounded in the other - that is, literary response is tied to the reader’s own “existential The most important word is ”history.” Rosenblatt had argued that associations, memories, feelings, prejudices, and experiences potentially influenced the reading experience, but she remained vague as to how and why these associations are important to reader response and whether some might be more important than others. Greene, on the other hand, draws on phenomenology to propose an intimate and indissoluble melding of literary aesthetic response with memory. The literary experience becomes “complete” when the reader is led “into himself.. .to reflect upon, and to re-form his ’image’ of his world.”42 Memory is what allows us to create a story about ourselves, according to Greene: “we identify ourselves by means of memory” and memory helps us “compose the stories of our lives” (TPR, 33). Stories are related to our being-in-the-world because the stories of ourselves arise out of ”the patterns and schemata” that “we use in the process of sense-making,’’ and these cultural patterns, which are also narratives, have been “made available to us” by previous stories, the ones that we read in childhood or studied in school and that comprised the canon on which our literary and cultural education was based (TPR, 24). Being-in-the-world and participating in the compos- ing of a life story also imply a social responsibility. Within a world characterized by plurality - that is, the existence of stories other than our own- we may not be able to choose the story of our beginning (birth and childhood), but we can choose to attend to and teach stories other than “the master story” we have been accustomed to hearing (RI , 118).

Second, in a later work, Releasing the Imagination, Greene talks about how the reading of literature can startle, surprise, or provoke thinking, and she includes an autobiographical retrospective in which she reflects on those literary works that caused shifts in how she thought about the world or raised questions that she would otherwise not have encountered because of her surroundings. The course of a life, Greene believes, can be changed by turning it into a story. Even “banal events” can be “transformed” (TPR, 33). Does this mean that ”lapses of attention” can be passed over and forgotten by placing them in a story with a different ending? No. Rather, it means that individuals can reflect on, recognize, become conscious of, and change the course of their lives; they can re-order their world based on a consciousness of

40. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1938); and Louise Rosenblatt, The Render, the Text, the Poem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). John Willinsky criticized Louise Rosenblatt for abandoning her social concern for literature and pursuing an aestheticized version of reader response; see Willinsky, The Triumph of LiteraturelThe Fate of Literacy [New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).

41. Greene, ”Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens,” 420.

42. Ibid.

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what Greene calls a “lack,” which does not correspond to thoughtlessness in the absolute but is instead a possible precursor of change. The notion of lack comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that a sense of anguish is linked with consciousness of freedom and an inescapable awareness of one’s own responsibility in seeking freedom.43 In thinking about the significance of Sartre’s ideas, Greene writes that “there has to be a surpassing of a constraining or deficient ‘reality,’ actually perceived as deficient by aperson or persons looking from their particular vantage points on the world.” That consciousness leads to possibility: “Made conscious of lacks, they [teachers] may move (in their desire to repair them) toward a ‘field of possibles,’ what is possible or realizable for them” (DF, 5).

If one story informs Greene’s thinking about the role of the imagination in public life, it is a “story of confrontation,” confronting the elisions, those things that have gone unacknowledged, the lacks, the darltnesses, all of which she likens to Marlow’s journey in Joseph Conrad’sHeurt ofDarkness: “Becauseit is a story of confrontation.. .it brings us back to where we began.”44 Reclaiming our own stories (or “landscapes,” as she calls them) involves recognizing our own “standpoints”: ”Looking back, recapturing their stories, teachers can recover their own standpoints on the social wor ld (TPR, 33). Words like “landscape” and “standpoint” disclose Greene’s phenomenological stance: “It is my view that persons are more likely to ask their own questions and seek their own transcendence when they feel themselves to he grounded in their own personal histories, their lived lives” (LL, 2). Maurice Merleau- Ponty advanced the notion of being grounded in our perceptions, or in the things we notice against the living and nonliving background that surrounds us.4s Similarly, Greene asserts that “To be in touch with our landscapes entails acknowledging our standpoint by becoming aware of our perceptions (that is, the fact that we have a standpoint and that the world is not simply given) and how those perceptions influence the way we encounter the world” JLL, 2). Individuals cannot recover an original, lost standpoint (one that resides in the past), but they can recover an original capacity to become challengers by carrying those memories and actions forward into the present and acknowledging how their own “distinctive biography” or “particular standpoint” influences others in the world (TPR, 24). This awareness can lead to an openness to hearing others’ stories (“standpoints”) and considering how the world could be ordered differently according to such stories.

Central to Greene’s thought is this notion of “releasing” the imagination. Not only does Greene believe that active engagement with literature and the arts provokes thought, but she also claims that these experiences can ”stir” us to respond to the world in particular ways (RI, 110). Greene is not interested in prescribing the ways in which we should act in the world. All she says is that engagement should be

43. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 44. Greene, “Real Toads andImaginaq Gardens,“ 423. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Great Works of [oseph Conrad (New York: Harper Collins, 1967). 45. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

WILSON Maxine’s Table 2 1 7

of the kind that “breaks us loose from our anchorage,” encourages us to find our own lived worlds lacking because of what we recognize, prompts us “to name what we see around us” (that is, racism and other forms of injustice), and as a result of this new consciousness, moves us to rewrite a story previously rooted in the “cotton wool of habit” (RI, 110, 111, llS}. She maintains that we will want to rewrite that story because we recognize its effects on others. We can vicariously discern these effects through our reading of literature, particularly that literature which represents the voices of “newcomers” (those whose words have historically gone unheard and unrecognized). The “lurch” or “shock” of recognition is a first indication of ”taking an initiative” (RI , 1231, or of the desire to do so, and a step in becoming the “challenger” that Greene recognizes in Arendt’s story of Rene Char.

What is initiated through this process? Greene turns to Sartre and Dewey to describe the significance of the “not yet” to choosing. The “not yet” refers to a consciousness of possibilities other than what may immediately present itself. Sartre articulates it as possibility, or the individual’s consciousness of choosing. Choosing defines existence. The individual needs to be aware not only of the fact that he or she is choosing, but that other choices are possible (TPR, 30). Dewey, another of Greene’s mentors, links choosing with the imagination, in which he sees an aesthetic experience and sensibility not confined to works of art but applicable to literally everything in life: “Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and The aesthetic is no more than an attentiveness to life and living, and the function of art and the imagination “has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine conscious- n e ~ s . ” ~ ~

At this point, it is appropriate to consider how Greene’s notion of story relates to Arendt’s. Like Greene, Arendt believed in the recuperative role of stories, but she defined this role more narrowly and specifically. Arendt‘s notion of story derived from her study of the ancient Greeks and the role that memory played in immortal- izing heroic actions. The polis, or public space for political action, was the forum in which actions shone in full splendor. Turning actions into stories was a way of remembering them. The writer acts as a witness to these glorious acts, just as Homer served as witness in The Iliad. Arendt’s notion of story is very Aristotelian and Homeric, drawn as it is to the epic form. According to Aristotle, storytelling consists in the imitation of human action: The plot discloses the action, and action discloses “who” a person is.46 Similarly, a story, 0rganize.d around the significant events in a person’s life between birth and death, discloses who that person is. Story is not about character or those internal struggles characteristic of the novel. Rather, a story narrates those deeds that lsclose aperson’s “being,” or the significance of time spent

46. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [London: George Allen and Unwin, 19541, 183

47. Ibid.,183-184.

48. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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on earth between life and death, the beginning and the ending. Furthermore, only others can write that story and testify to the “who” that is disclosed by the deeds. Arendt had little interest in autobiographical forms of narrative. Nevertheless, Arendt’s notion of story had a significant influence on Greene’s own conception of story: “Hannah Arendt has written of the importance of ‘enacted stories’ and the ways in which stories disclose a ’who,’ an ‘agent”’ and how every individual life “’between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end.. . . ‘rr49

Even though Arendt’s politics directly shaped her interest in narrative, while Greene’s understanding seems to have come more from her engagement with literature and the arts, Greene ultimately rests her argument for the composing of a life on political grounds. The composing of a life story results from choosing. Active participation in literature and the arts influences how we make choices, but it would be foolish to argue that a one-to-one correspondence exists between the choices a character makes in a novel and the choices a teacher makes in a classroom. The connection between imagination and action is more subtle, though no less vital for being so: “Dewey believed, as does Sartre, that what we become, what we make of ourselves, depends on what we do in our lives” (TPR, 26). What we do in our lives depends on our capacity for imagination; therefore, Greene argues, literature and the arts have a crucial place in the school curriculum and play an important role for teachers, who need always to be “challengers. ”

Greene’s recommendations are grounded in her belief that a self is only “authen- tic” if it is involved in continuous dialogue with other selves and other perspectives. Possibilities need to be explored with others. In meeting with William Pinar to prepare an edited collection of essays on her life’s work, Greene posed the following question to herself ”Who am I?” Her response, Pinar records, was “I am who I am not yet.”5a It is not only, as Pinar concludes, that Greene means that she is not yet; she means that we are all not yet. Her writings and teaching on the “not yet” constitute her own quintessential action of influencing others (especially teachers] to adopt this stance within the world.

CONCLUSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF ILLUMINATING SPACES The metaphor of illumination informs both Arendt’s and Greene’s writings.

Illumination describes the concrete ideal of imagination working on and informing public spaces. Two recent collections of essays written in homage to Greene (The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene and A Light in Dark Times] testify to the

49. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184; cited in Greene, “Teaching,“ 33. A recent and provocative source on the sigmficance of narrative to Arendt‘s political thought is Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001 1. Another valuable source on the relation between action and stories in Arendt’s thinking is Paul Ricoeur, “Action, Story and History: On Re-reading The Human Condition,” in The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner [New York: Peter Lang, 19901, 149-164.

50. William F. Pinar, ed., The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: “I am.. .not yet” (London: Falmer Press, 19981, 1.

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formidable impact that her thinking has had on teachers and teacher educator^.^^ The latter title conspicuously echoes Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, a book that addresses how certain individuals (women as well as men] have shaped public spaces within the narrow compass of their lives. The title of Arendt’s book comes from her belief that “even in the darkest times we have the right to expect some i l lumina t i~n .”~~ For Arendt, “dark times” referred most prominently to the shadow of Nazism that influenced her own life and choices. Whereas it ought to be and “is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do,” totalitarian governments (like that of Adolf Hitler) attempted to abolish the space of appearance^.^^ Arendt became preoccupied with “evil” as a social and political phenomenon as well as with the role of thinking and human action in countering political ideologies that, through indoctrination, stunt people’s capacity for collective action.

Drawing on Arendt’s analysis, William Ayers and Janet L. Miller testify that “Maxine Greene is for many of us a light in dark times”; by dark times, Ayers and Miller mean “the frozen, the routine, the unexamined,” which are continuous themes of Greene.54 Greene has consistently criticized technical rationality, an approach to curriculum and assessment that emphasizes systematizing learning objectives and outcomes through strict adherence to textbooks and teacher manuals. While technical rationality was first popularized in the 1950s, this approach has been on the rise in the United States and increasingly in Canada, as indicated by widespread adoption of high-stakes testing and demands for increased accountabil- ity: “What does this view of dark times signify for pedagogy in the present day?. . .How can the extinguished light be lit again so that teachers and learners can appear before one another and show, in speech and action, who they are and what they can do?” (RI, 44). For Greene, the ultimate answer to these questions is that educators must act autonomously and resist the pressure to conform, a goal achievable by engaging with literature and the arts and participating in dialogue with others.

Greene’s vision of society is filtered through her interest and involvement in education and schools. Illumination comes from teachers becoming thoughtful and attentive. Teaching is fundamentally a social and political practice; its purpose is to engender a space of appearances in the classroom within which students’ lives can be illuminated. She returns continually to the relevance of Arendt and Char to demonstrate that this common and public world needs to be created together: “Arendt herself made it continually clear that this active world only comes into being when people come together in ‘action and speech,‘ retaining their ‘agent- revealing capacity’ [HC, 1821, and speaking from their life-worlds” (RI, 196-1971. Within the particular context of a classroom, the teacher is responsible for creating

51. Pinar, ed., The DassionateMind of Maxine Greene; and Ayers and Miller, eds., A Light in Dark Times. 52. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19681, ix. 53. Ibid., viii-ix.

54. Ayers and Miller, Light in Dark Times, x, ix.

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the “conditions” that allow those life-worlds and self-namings to appear and thus provoke students “to speak in their own voices,” as who and what they are as situated beings (RI, 196, 190).

Greene not only continues Arendt’s thinking on narrative and judgment, but she completes it for educators like herself by emphasizing the imagination‘s central role in linhng the creation of public spaces in classrooms with the capacity to choose and imagine alternatives to those choices. Greene’s public spaces may seem small and local compared with Arendt’s polis; however, Greene has shown, successfully I think, how the occasions for acting with imagination are with us every day.