Multiplicities of Voice, Realities, and Shocks: On Maxine Greene's Literary Approach and the Arts' Centrality

Abstract

 The straightforward concept of “voice” refers not only to the physiological and acoustic “sound” but also to the socio-cultural phenomenon of “asserting an individual opinion.” Between the minority whose right to raise their voices is oppressed and those involved in that oppression, political tensions inevitably arise over liberation from oppression.

 However, if people have much to gain in their daily lives by avoiding the tensions that come with speaking out, they will suppress their own voices. If education as a discourse distribution system promotes the de-manifestation of the political “voice,” then we are already narrowing the base of publicness and the opportunity for democratic correction of the tyranny of the majority in a curriculum that fosters human freedom and publicness shaped by emphasis on minority freedom of thought, conscience, speech, and expression.

 In considering the problematic “voice” system, this study draws support from the philosophy of Maxine Greene (1917–2014). In particular, it emphasizes the literary approach she utilized for philosophical argumentation and the central role she assigned to the arts in curriculum development.

 This study is structured as follows. First, it organizes the criticisms of Greene's literary approach, in order to express the “voices” of people swirling in the lifeworld and show the characteristics of this approach.

 Specifically, based on analysis of Green's writings and articles, the study examines the frameworks and critiques related to interpreting her as an existential phenomenologist, pragmatist, and literary critic. It explores Greene's own “voice” as a woman practicing a feminist philosophy of education, an aspect not detailed in other frameworks. Throughout her career in academia, her colleagues often criticized her approach as being “too soft,” “too literary,” and “too female.” However, these criticisms from male ordinary language philosophers provided a “reality enforcement” indeed: Virginia Woolf's concept of “shock-receiving capacity,” discovering and expressing one's own voice by writing about the shock of multiple realities beyond what the majority considers “real” in ordinary life, influenced Greene's approach to the feminist philosophy of education.

 Next, referring to the multiplicities of “voice” that inspired Greene, the study presents her philosophy of aesthetic education and artistic-aesthetic curriculum structure as a response to the problematic “voice” system. This structure, called the “arts' centrality,” gives students' lifeworlds presence through the encounter with aesthetic symbol systems, and makes the students' voices real by putting them into the arts constructs shared by the art worlds between cultural majorities and minorities, thus opening public spaces in schools. For Greene, education involves creating these open spaces and prompting educators to critically assess their own cultures. Education aims to develop the “shock-receiving capacity” by understanding one's own “voice” in tandem with the learner.