Aesthetic Inquiry: Teaching Under the Influence of Maxine Greene

In Aesthetics and the Experience of the Arts: Towards Transformations, Maxine Greene speaks to the reader with passion and immediacy about the transformative possibilities of aesthetic encounters with works of art. For Greene, works of art are not to be passively experienced. They are to be "achieved" (Greene, 1980, p. 316). A "certain stance" (p. 316) is required of us "if the sounds and the light are to become available to consciousness" (p. 316). To take that stance of questioning and alertness, a willingness to take the time to look more deeply and to see what is to be seen is to understand what it is to "awaken to the ways in which the arts are grasped by human consciousness (p. 317)." This awakening is the means through which art becomes a force for transformation, opening the channels through which individuals are changed by an encounter with a painting or a poem.

Fully grasping a work of art often requires curiosity, patience, and a willingness to challenge oneself to extend one's perceptions beyond the comfortable and familiar. In many of her lectures and writing, Greene described the work involved in embracing and fully apprehending a painting or a symphony as "lending a work of art your life." This notion suggests a reciprocal relationship between work of art and audience as Greene writes:

In some fashion, as one attends, one lends the work one's life. Or one brings it into the world through a sometimes mysterious interpretive act in a space between oneself and the stage or the wall or the text (2001, p. 128).

The work of art is not inert, and the person interacting with the art cannot be passive. We learn to listen, to open ourselves to what the artist is telling us—this human being transmitting a message across space and time—we apprehend a version of the subject of the work that is mediated by the artist's perception and voice. By taking the time to look and look again and use language and gestures to describe what we observe, we open ourselves further to grasp the work's meaning.

This is what Greene describes as a "distinctive mode of literacy, an achieved capacity to break with ordinary ways of seeing and hearing" (p. 319). Where teachers are engaged in the pedagogy of aesthetic education, we see 21^st Century classrooms come alive through these kinds of interactions. In my own experience as a teacher and as a staff developer, I have introduced students and teachers to the possibilities of aesthetic education across the curriculum. In a seventh grade social studies class we used Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs to put a human face on this distant historical period. We asked the students to study the photographs and work in small groups to annotate the images with observations and questions. After this activity the students seemed to be deeply moved by the images and curious about the lives of the people in them. We invited them to write poems based on the pictures. Instead of the usual textbook approach to the Social Studies curriculum, these students were curious and eager to dive into their studies of American history. One soft-spoken girl named Sarah gave voice to the battlefield itself in her poem:

I am the grass soaked in bloodThe sky looking down on the fieldSuddenly quietAs the only thing moving is theSmoke rising in the air.

In another example, a Bronx English Language Arts classroom in a high school for newcomers, teenagers who were recent immigrants intensely studied Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and wrote their own stories in response. In the midst of this unit of study a boy named Andy jumped out of his chair and ran across the room with a book of Lawrence's paintings, eager to show his teacher an image of a young boy picking cotton in a field stooping from the weight of his heavy basket. "This is me!" This moment of lending his life to Lawrence's paintings led Andy to write this poem about...