Teachers College held the 3rd Annual Radical Philosophies in Education Seminar: Maxine Greene over the course of two weekends in February and closed with a seminar lecture by Maxine Greene on March 3. The seminar was taught by John Baldacchino, TC’s Associate Professor of Art Education and Honorary Professor, Gray's School of Art at Scotland’s The Robert Gordon University.

 

The Radical Philosophies and Education course cycle (offering 3 courses a year including the Annual Radical Philosophies and Education Annual Seminars) have featured and hosted eminent philosophies Ernesto Laclau (2007) and Jacques Ranciere (2008). This year’s seminar sought to understand the political, philosophical and aesthetic roots of Maxine Greene’s work—a scholar who has inspired generations of educators within and beyond Teachers College—through the examination of two of her major works: The Dialectic of Freedom and Releasing the Imagination. In these works, Greene reaffirms her central argument that learning is a radical catalyst for possibility as this emerges through our understanding of the self and the imaginary.

 

Baldacchino has been a colleague of philosopher Maxine Greene for many years, and recently published Education Beyond Education (Peter Lang, 2009), a book that explores Greene's fundamental work in the realm of self and the imagination and how they are applied to learning strategies in classroom environments.

 

As with the other Radical Seminar’s, Baldacchino reviews key arguments in making philosophy a more potent force in current educational methods, especially in the fields of art and literature. These courses are designed for both educators and students wishing to think beyond a conventional curriculum.

 

To view the 2009 Radical Philosophies and Education Seminar lecture by Maxine Greene on March 3, visit www.tc.columbia.edu/news/6905.