About Aesthetic Education
In this short video, Greene speaks of "wide-awakeness" in the midst of an aesthetic encounter... |
In Variations on a Blue Guitar: Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education, Maxine Greene seeks to define aesthetic education for us in a number of ways. For example, in the first chapter, Defining Aesthetic Education, aesthetic education is defined as "an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful." (pg.6)
In the chapter, Notes on Aesthetic Educaton: An Initiation into New Ways of Seeing, Hearing, Feeling, and Moving...Greene reminds us that we are interested "in education here, not schooling", and that aesthetic education as we understand it is not "in any sense a fringe undertaking, a species of 'frill'". (pg.7)
The works of art we encounter through the approach known as aesthetic education - aesthetic encounters, as Greene calls them - are "situated encounters. That means that the perceivers of a given work of art apprehend that work in the light of their backgrounds, biographies, and experiences. We have to presume a multiplicity of perspectives, a plurality of interpretations. Clearly, this opens aesthetic educators to the likelihood of more than one interpretation of a poem, a dance, a play, a musical piece." (pg.175)
The Maxine Greene Institute serves as a gateway for artists, educators, researchers and all those interested in learning more about these aesthetic encounters, the canon embedded in the philosophy of aesthetic education, all the while sharing our practice and experiences - in the light of our backgrounds and biographies - with each other, world-wide.
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Maxine, circa 1940 and journal excerpt
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The proper way to encounter another person is to be open to them, to be ready to see new dimensions, new facets of the other, to recognize the possibility of some fresh perception or understanding, so you may know the other better, appreciate that person more variously. This is, actually, how we ordinarily treat each other as persons. We do not treat each other as case histories, or instances of some psychological or sociological reality - not, that is, in personal encounters. Nor do we come up against each other as if the other were merely an inanimate object, incapable of reciprocation. There are analogues between this and encounters with works of art, especially in the readiness for fresh illumination, in the willingness to see something, to risk something unexpected and new." - Maxine Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar (pp. 53-54) |
What more does Greene say about aesthetic encounters, in her writings? Here, another excerpt from Variations:
To read a brief history of aesthetic education, please go HERE.
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