Maxine+Greene+Workshop

= Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education/National Educator Workshop: Literature with Maxine Greene  =

Spent the week at Maxine's session in her apartment. Mara Linaberger also taking notes: http://maralinaberger.wikispaces.com/LCI%20Advanced%20Institute


 * Day 1** (7/13/09)
 * Literature should be treated as an art form. - MG
 * Appreciation is a mystery. - MG
 * More notes will be added here later (took notes in hard copy this day)

Discussing the book Austerlitz.. With her permission, we are recording the sessions this week for our podcast series, "The Aesthetic Technology." Link will be posted here later for the podcast that will include these Maxine sessions.
 * Day 2** (7/14/09)
 * //Maxine Introduction://
 * Who decides what is right and what is wrong? - MG
 * We initiate children into society especially the diaspora (and children from so many places) - MG
 * Art begins where explanation stops. - MG
 * What is the difference between fiction and reality? - MG
 * "I have a dream" is an illusion. - MG
 * How important are names? (i.e. Michael Jackson) - MG
 * The question of identity? - MG
 * post-structuralism - MG
 * Is there a self? - MG
 * "The self is created in choice and action. There is no fixed identity." - MG
 * "Education is a process of becoming different." - MG
 * "If I don't know who I am in the beginning who do I become later?" - MG
 * "Education is in interpreted experience." - MG
 * Edward Sayed at MLA- MG
 * Journals presented in a niche - MG
 * What is a "poetry slam?" - MG
 * Enclopedia of Curriculum Studies - MG
 * Existential approaches to curriculum - MG
 * Phenemological approaches to currriculum - MG
 * "What is the context of curriculum with regard to identity?" - Maxine Greene - MG
 * How do we relate the author to Austerlitz? - MG
 * Does uncertainty connect them? - MG
 * "Much of ethics should be silent." MG
 * What is the metaphor here? - MG
 * If you were tell a story of your own life how would you do it? - MG
 * Baldachino wrote a book about Maxine Greene (published by Lang - she hates and doesn't include her stories)
 * "We define ourselves by means of language." - MG
 * Let's look at the metaphors of the architecture and stations in Austerlitz. - MG
 * It opens up connections that are not obvious. - MG
 * Who would connect a raccoon to Wichtenstein?- MG
 * Giving up power and the idea of betrayal - MG
 * Watch the film, "The Lives of Others" - MG
 * Literature should be contemplating the connections between the illusions and reality. - MG
 * The fear of foreign places as a child - MG
 * "Fear of leaving as a child and the fear of going. I won't know anybody." - MG
 * Maxine Greene: "Imagination lights the slow fuse of possibility." - Emily Dickinson
 * Give children imagination and possibilities. -MG
 * Imagination gives us an alternative reality. -MG
 * Would you be willing to teach poetry in Walmart?
 * Is there an assumption that curriculum is the only way?
 * Can you really subscribe to one perspective when looking at imagination?
 * "We owe it to people to find the alternatives that are possible." (Maxine Greene talking about teachers that come to Lincoln Center and discover they love a particular type of dance like the tango)
 * "Reading poetry gives you the sense of finding alternatives." - MG
 * pg. 25 - thinking about doors behind which childhood lurks, doors that you don't want to open, then he talks about torture and Italian novelli and his heart was affected by his torture and the stations in Paris and going to the eye doctor. - MG
 * pg. 29 labryrinth - problems with language
 * It is through language that we create meaning. (i.e. interest in bilingual reality) How does language open? How do people that speak two languages look in different windows?- MG
 * Nelson Goodman wrote a book: __Languages of Art__ - MG
 * How are we related physically related to literature? - MG
 * Body images (the few works of art have to do with African American women's bodies) - MG
 * ghostcatching - Nemon Simone - MG
 * MG: Alice Walker - "Womanism" and the way black women have suffered through naming and categorizing: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=ISk&ei=IqZcSuW4G47mM-au5L8C&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Alice+Walker+-+%22Womanist%22+and+the+way+black+women+have+suffered+through+naming+and+categorizing.&spell=1&cts=1247585835028
 * Scene design relates to art history and art. - MG
 * Dewey architecture as experience chapter from "Art as Experience" relates to the book's descriptions of architecture.
 * pg. 39 - The crowd is untruth. You lose your identity when you run with the crowd. You become anonymous. - MG
 * Is it different when you think about protest groups? - MG
 * Are we keeping children asleep with curriculum? Or are we uncovering and awakening them (through aesthetic education)? - MG
 * Is Austerlitz a metaphor for our children we teach or what can it be? We take away/strip away children's identities, histories and cultures? - MG
 * "Socialization factories" - MG
 * Maxine accused of "soft cognition" (i.e. cut and dry approaches) - MG
 * stick figures devoid of emotion instead of living beings - MG
 * Fred Astaire thought Michael Jackson was the best dancer in history.
 * Great conversation about virtual worlds and digitalization (Maxine wants to talk about digitalization).
 * The loss of handwriting (i.e. with digital) (Maxine describes her accident and the lss
 * talking about virtual worlds
 * "An art experience has to have a dialogue." - MG
 * talking about digital natives versus immigrants
 * Al Franken "Your decisions about children."


 * Day 3** (7/15/09)
 * Reader experience - What happens to the reader as the book brings us along in our experiences? - MG
 * Walter Benjamin - writer: What happens to art in an age in reproduction? What happens to a DaVinci painting when you have postcards made? How does the Mona Lisa on an ice box change the meaning of her? When it is reproduced over and over and over again it changes it and loses it's aura. (He committed suicide when the Nazi's came) If we don't tell stories of our experience, it breaks into parts and makes no sense. Maxine describes that she had no kitchen table stories growing up. - MG
 * Wolfgang Eiser - each of the personas in Austerlitz has a different perspective of experience (i.e. vera's memory of Aust. family, people taking things away from Adella's house, etc.) It is up to us to make a cohesive story. Once the reader understands all the various personas we are left with out experiences. It can contradict or echo our experience. It diverges from some of the experiences of the reader. It doesn't always connect to the external world and the reader's experience? - MG
 * Ulyses (i.e. dull day in Dublin, futility of living) Why do we want to read about a dull day in Ireland? - MG
 * With Austerlitz we ask, "Do we identify with Austerlitz" or who? The narrator is just as sick as Austerlitz. - MG
 * What do you think about your experience and a work like Austerlitz? - MG
 * The book __Neverland__ referenced (begins in the hotel Chelsea with strange people and strange art work. A Dutch man who marries an English woman. A Trinadadian introduces them to his culture such as cricket clubs, etc.). Wonderful story of death, immigration and delight. - MG
 * "Conversation brings up the common ground among us." - MG
 * "I am interested in the context of Anne Frank." The solitude, horror being locked in with other people that you don't always understand. - MG
 * One of the participants is describing the [|Anne Frank Museum]. (i.e. professor talking about taking an emotional intelligence approach to her students, the story and her class)
 * Freedom Writers book, movie and play were discussed (i.e. saw teacher Ellen Gruel speak)
 * Social imagination - "I am interested in what people do and don't do with this preoccupation with social justice." - MG
 * How can someone set aside your humanity? "Don't you think we should use the arts when we talk about specifics rather than social justice?" Do people really know what social justice really is? - MG
 * Are stories and visual manifestations (i.e. art, plays, books, etc.) detached from the conversations about social justice? What is it if we aren't specific about where it is expressed? (Camille)
 * [|Anselm Kiefer] is mentioned (i.e. Gestalt of it, emotional responses) and compared to Anne Frank's story.
 * When I lived in NYC/Philly I used to look at Anselm Kiefer paintings spending hours thinking about them. One of his paintings I remember contained human hair that had been burned and embedded in a vast barren black landscape-type painting and it was later written that this was symbolic of the Jewish people burned in the Nazi camps. I used to think how looking at his paintings were like being where the smells of this burnt hair would have taken place. There was an evilness about the work...(Camille)
 * pg. 216 Austerlitz talks about what he forgot and all the clues... The buildings knew something ominous about me. This turning away made him safe (and not noticing some of the deeper things around him that weren't safe).
 * How do we reach minority students? Maxine talking about how quantitative research language as it is applied to minority students is scary and inferring that it is innapropriate.
 * pg. 194 -195 Benjamin talks about storytelling that could describe a work of art - items on display:
 * **What are the unanswered questions we have? When you are old there are unanswered questions. What does it mean when you have no future? If there is no future, how do you create meaning? Literature sheds light on your own experience. Do we find anything? Does literature encourage us or is it one day after another? What is the difference between us? "Every dull day is full of things like shops you don't see where you don't see things and the connections between them." - MG**
 * **Momentos outlive the owners. Objects last but we don't. If you aren't there to explain it, meaningless takes over. - MG**
 * **I**n the atrium of the MOMA, they have a kitchen of a Chinese woman **(How do you find out by what life was lie**
 * "I am interested in the relationship with subject and object." - MG
 * "I look sometimes out my window at the benches that mean nothing until I see love scenes or a homeless man there." - MG
 * Alice Walker tells the stories of her mother's gardens. Benjamin says that without stories, traditions aren't established. - MG
 * Do stories
 * __Swan's Way__ referenced **-** "How can I ever write my story the way he tells his?" - MG
 * Is it given when we are born
 * **How do we increase aesthetic sensitivity in children?** (Participant - his name?)
 * **How do we increase social justice sensitivity in children?**
 * **How do we learn aesthetic experiences ourselves?** **What stories do we have?**
 * **Who are our teachers around us? And do they point out aesthetic details?**
 * Relation between moral and the imagination?
 * Maxine Greene hated her other her whole life for making her wear things that she didn't want wear and doing things she didn't want to do.
 * Describing her mother taking singing lessons (i.e and how her family made fun of this middle class woman)
 * Imagining middle class woman and what makes her the way she is. - MG
 * Maxine said she would use her imagine her mother as being different. - MG
 * How bad does it have to be before you give your children away to someone else? another participant
 * Into the //Arms of Strangers// film was referenced by participant
 * "Maybe I want to be self dramatizing." - MG "My father gave me a lot of constructs and he was uneducated." Her father used to say, "Everything is constructivity and deconstructivity." Maxine looked for a note when her father (Max) died to explain his life. There wasn't one so she made up a story with her imagination - He was a tragic figure of capitalism and a self-dramatizing actor. - MG
 * The conversation going on about children not noticing because of mechanical things made me think of the article "If you don't stop, you don't see anything" by Rika Burnham (Camille)
 * The stories between the students and the teacher are more important than the content (i.e it is how we build trust).
 * Frank McCourt's __Teacher Man__ (mentioned when I read about how a teacher used cookbooks to teach literature, social justice issues, how I wished just one of my teachers had approached literature questioning the great works and what was taught in the curriculum) (i.e. Camille)
 * Concept of "provisioning"
 * "Teaching is a subversive act." (participant)
 * Teaching is an intellectual and heart pursuit.
 * I think among the best teachers I have seen are the teaching artists. I am very interested in crossing the road between what we do and what Lincoln Center is doing.
 * Alice Cohen __Somebody Should Have Told Me__ book about two teaching artists married, divorced and the baby went with the mother.
 * Teaching artists are so in love with what they do and translating it into language that people can understand. -MG
 * Most professors I have known don't seem like they love what they do, are passionate like teaching artists. They are so busy spouting off content and they never connect with their students. It occurs to me that in a learning community trust and shared experiences are most important (Camille)
 * "What is the relationship between film and literature?" - MG
 * __The Hours__ vs. __Madame Bovery__ (also __Moby Dick__) was described.
 * __The Lives of Others__ referenced: Everyone discussing whether or not we would watch the film this week.
 * Maybe tomorrow we could talk about poetry. - MG
 * What parts of Austerlitz are dense and point them out, the style and the language - MG.
 * talking about childhoods lurking beyond the door (Austerlitz) - MG
 * Music has layers of perception. The things you notice the second time you don't notice the first. - MG
 * A work of literature could be a work of art. Is the diary of Anne Frank a work of art? - MG
 * What about artist intention? - MG
 * What is the context the art is placed in?
 * I don't think Anne Frank intended on her book to be a work of art. - MG


 * Day 4** 7/16/09
 * How do you understand an aesthetic ex
 * perience? - MG
 * How much does it have to do with the object itself? - MG
 * How much does it have to do with our response to it? - MG
 * **What is the difference between an aesthetic experience and an emotional response?**
 * "A work of art is transformative and makes me see the world differently." - MG
 * I think it is important to consider all the emotions and the work of art. - MG
 * If you don't respond with your whole self, you are missing something don't you think? - MG
 * We aren't trying to make dances but to help teachers
 * How do you translate this workshop experience into your teachers?
 * Is it important because you are opening up the minds and bodies of children?
 * Is it to connect it to popular culture? and hip hop culture?
 * Conversation about hip hop: []
 * What are all the ways of disguising? Or things being hidden?
 * What would I do if there was a fire and I lost my books? My books are my identity... - MG
 * Walter Benjamin "Without story there is no tradition and there is no feeling of who you are." - MG
 * Sodomayor - "I can't put my experience aside."
 * I am so interested in experience and cultural law and principles. - MG
 * Our own feelings about art and how we think we are supposed to respond
 * What is the personal presence?
 * Can't you put aside the fact that you are a woman when talking about abortion? - MG
 * social justice/injustice component
 * Professor in Chicago published: __Poetic Justice__ - bringing literature in law promote empathy (participant)
 * Discussing being alone, connections and relationships create an identity. - MG
 * p. 248 "transformation of sound..." How did you feel about the relationship of the image and the words? - MG
 * p. 237 "when I became to recover to some degree.."
 * p. 167 Maximillian responding (descriptions, Aust finding his own personal memories, emotional writing)
 * "lend your life" in reading literature
 * Maxine talks about coming from Straussberg and Germany and the guilt of Jews being here surviving as opposed to those who lost their life.
 * This Way to The Gas referenced by Maxine Greene (frightening)
 * Are facts really repellent?
 * At TC someone created a curriculum based on Spike Lee's work
 * talking about Katrina and social justice - MG
 * brought up the art teacher (Rachel Omenson) that went to the Astrodome (Art at the Astrodome): http://www.amillionsmocks.org/astrodome/domesite/index.html -Camille
 * What is the role of art
 * Dewey and the unaesthetic (we all have novacaine on our minds)

//What she talked about://
 * LCI Resource Room: Listening to Maxine Greene** - 7/17/09
 * I am very interested in how memory plays a part in learning about art
 * Collections play a part in memories and it is what enriches aesthetic experiences.
 * What is an aesthetic experience?
 * There isn't one answer.
 * open people up to the extraordinary
 * routine
 * automatic
 * "break the shackles that tie you to the habitual"
 * We settle for things not changing and things remaining the same forever.
 * Education is the process of becoming different. - Dewey
 * The opposite of being aesthetic is anaesthetic.
 * I am sure you have all felt as if "wow, I have never that that way before."
 * "An unconcealed look"
 * What happens here at LCI?
 * In the transaction of looking at art, my experience is part of it.
 * We have to be personally there in an almost electrical event.
 * "shackles on the mind" affects what you see... The things we don't see (like the Germans not seeing the Nazi camps) We say things like, "that could never happen to me."
 * How many things we deny.
 * How important imagination is to pull off the cover. Some of this comes through art.
 * William Blake's chartered streets or
 * "everything controlled (buildings and the streets)
 * Ghostcatchers & releasing imagination
 * It isn't enough for children to have aesthetic experiences. What do they do with it?
 * social imagination, social ethics and aesthetics
 * Somali's that get jobs at Walmart while terrorism is going back to their own culture.
 * Paule Friere "wide awakening" and "cultures of silence"
 * You have to have a great imagination to imagine Auschw.
 * designing a curriculum of imagination commodifies imagination.
 * Is there a moral fabric?
 * You have to live by principle and there has to be a line that you don't cross.
 * There is a problem in education to children to imagine while teaching justice, ethics, etc..


 * Day 5** 7/17/09
 * Dewey says relatively little about literature.
 * [|The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response] - Wolfgang Iser - MG
 * Differences in responses to Austerlitz
 * Imagination is so important to consider in art. - MG
 * "It is the dark side of imagination concerns me. It isn't all benevolent." - MG
 * We have to bring ourselves to our work but we have to balance our boundaries. We can't teach only from our own life. (participant)
 * Bill Ayers wife Bernadine won an award for children's rights and justice (imprisonment of teenagers). - MG
 * Some people talk about some high schools as pathways to prison - MG
 * School as a system of oppression - MG
 * Thinking about hegemony - school's educate children to enter the public sphere - MG
 * Obama: African American children have to take responsibility for their children. His grandmother was his greatest influence who happened to be white. - MG
 * Bill Cosby in the news for race and about cultural communities taking responsibility MG
 * issues of victimization - you give up a lot of responsibility when you think of yourself as a victim. - MG
 * Paulo Freire - internalization of other people's feelings of you based on race. This is part of manipulation and thinking about
 * Talking about Alice Walker and "Womanism" generated by LCI that Maxine says was so angry, bitter and resentful.
 * Many parents suffer and they need to understand that suffering
 * Screening for cancer is usually unsuccessful
 * Goldman Sachs and Morgan giving big bonuses (screening that they recommend for men doesn't save lives - it is deceiving)
 * The whole world is a lie. - MG
 * The whole world is disguising. - MG
 * Microsoft has been doing research and finding that schools like [|Philadelphia School of the Future] with technology are not necessarily working. Having technology in a school doesn't necessarily mean they will be more successful than others.
 * Is there an emphasis on moral education now? - MG
 * Participants talking about character education
 * Many of us want to become p
 * art of communities that do things in response to bigger issues (participant)
 * James Colmer (participant)
 * The terror of isolation... - MG
 * Life is chaotic. An aesthetic experience creates an order. It takes all those objects in the store window and makes a pattern out of them. Shouldn't that make a difference in people's lives. - MG
 * We hope that reflection creates a kind of order. - MG
 * Poetry slams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_slam
 * More about poetry slams: http://www.google.com/search?q=poetry+slams&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
 * Poetry slams are performed by students as competitions.
 * Children like to reject traditional poetry structures and they like to mimic non-traditional forms. (Mara)
 * It says a lot about what expression can mean. - MG
 * Children of exestentialists know about mortality and the unexpectedness of life. I never had that. - MG
 * I don't want to think of poetry as theropeutic but it can have that effect on me. - MG
 * Experiencing a poem from the inside is looking at our reactions and internal feelings. - MG
 * Experiencing a poem from the outside is looking at the structures. - MG
 * If there is something I hate, it is indifference. - MG
 * What is the relationship between poetry, film and prose stories? - MG
 * Mythologize idea...
 * Incarceration of women and their children... - MG
 * The impact of a story or poem - does it make an impact for incarceration? - MG
 * Maxine was asked by her student to be in La Mama (her wheel chair) deals with //distancing//
 * //Maxine sharing and reading poems...//
 * **[|Elizabeth Bishop's One Art]:** "The art of losing isn't hard to master. Lose something everything day. Then practice losing faster. None of these will bring disaster." - MG
 * Memorizing a poem and making it your own can moves you. Why don't - MG
 * Maxine talking about a course she taught, "Changing Styles in Literature and Visual Arts" Wordsworth's Prelude. What it is to notice and to become a poet and transform...
 * **[|Marge Piercy] __[|To Be of Use]__**
 * **Mark Rose** wrote a book on work and a job done well - MG
 * Maxine included **[|Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden]**
 * Making the ordinary the extraordinary (Dewey) - MG
 * **[|Elizabeth Bishop In the Waiting Room]**
 * **[|Adrienne Rich In a Classroom]**
 * **[|Claude McKay The Harlem Dancer]**
 * **Langston Hughes** __**The Negro Speaks of Rivers**__
 * The way we were looked at? -MG
 * When I first started to be in a wheelchair got invited to TC graduation
 * that look like I am not human like them
 * The "other" How does one look at a stranger? How does one come in touch wuth the other. We all see different Central Parks. Is there a common Central Park? There is something about the interrelations of language. Doesn't how you see Central Park depend on your experience with parks? - MG
 * What did the [|The Gates]do to the park? MG
 * Maxine talked about her book, [|Teacher as Stranger] looking at a stranger you could see more...
 * Alfred Schutz (his book about experiences with strangers)
 * I wouldn't call it that now..."stranger" or "other" ? -MG
 * The objective world that never changes is so painful. Dewey objected so much to something being the same. Things are still transforming. - MG talks about Dewey
 * **"I am what I am not yet."** - MG
 * "I am becoming someone that wears galoshes." - MG
 * Someone talked about seeing people in NYC and not the things around them.
 * Talked about my own development and seeing things differently as an artist, seeing things differently around people as an educator, noticing the ceiling, art on the wall, people, environments, etc.. Referring to students I have had that have been schizophrenic or autistic. filtering what you notice. How do you really see everything? (Camille)
 * What is the line between being crazy and normal? (i.e. when you see so much)
 * Maxine talking about her 3 sisters and one of them was deaf.
 * Everything depends on the organization of your mind. - MG
 * Her sister had a series of unrelated sensations. Maxine talks about how she stayed with them for a short time and how Maxine was terrified that she would grow up like her sister. - MG
 * Memory and retrievel and filling the empty holes in art. - MG
 * Some people don't want to remember their childhood. - MG
 * Maxine mentioned the //TC Student Press Initiative// (Reicher's Island children and story)
 * Maxine read Samuel Pizer //__After Survival to Self-Discovery__//
 * Maxine teaches a course at TC called //Education and the Aesthetic Experience//
 * Maxine mentioned the __Living Room Series__ - Did any of you work with Jean Taylor (performer). It is not like my Salon Sundays. - MG
 * mentioned History of Love, Friday Morning, the Lazurus Project from her salons - MG
 * The next one will be the Neverland - Joseph O'Neil (the cricket clubs - the Dutchman and the Chelsea Hotel) - MG