Releasing the Imagination

MAXINE GREENE is professor of philosophy and education and William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education (emeritus), Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is also founder of the Center for the Imagination. She teaches at the Lincoln Center for the Arts. A past president of AERA, AESA, and the Philosophy of Education Society, Greene's previous books include The Dialectic of Freedom (1988) and Landscapes of Learning (1978).

• Introduction: A Quest for MeaningPart One: Creating Possibilities1. Seeking Contexts2. Imagination, Breakthroughs, and the Unexpected3. Imagination, Community, and the School4. Consciousness and the Public Space5. Social Vision and the Dance of Life6. The Shapes of Childhood RecalledPart Two: Imagination and Education7. Blue Guitars and the Search for Curriculum8. Writing to Learn9. Teaching for Openings10. Art and Imagination11. Texts and MarginsPart Three: Community in the Making12. The Passions of Pluralism13. Standards, Common Learnings, and Diversity14. Multiple Voices and Multiple Realities

"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination ingeneral education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and thesocial and multicultural context.... The author argues for schoolsto be restructured as places where students reach out for meaningsand where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. Sheinvites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate theirown visions through the application of imagination and the arts.Should be required reading for all educators, particularly those inteacher education, and for general and academic readers."--Choice "Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes here animpassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening mindsand for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities ofworlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strongrhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence ofessays presented here." --American Journal of Education "Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of thepossibilities of human experience and education's role in itsrealization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures foreducational conformity." --Elliot W. Eisner, professor of educationand art, Stanford University "Releasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and clichelittering the field of education today. It breaks through theroutine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks thereader into new awareness." --William Ayers, associate professor,College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago