TITLE:
Releasing the Social Imagination: Art, the Aesthetic Experience, and Citizenship in Education
AUTHORS:
Seungho Moon, Shawn Rose, Alison Black, James Black, Yeorim Hwang, Lisa Lynn, Jason Memoli
KEYWORDS:
Maxine Greene; the Aesthetic Experience; Social Imagination; Arts; Citizenship
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.4 No.3,
March
25,
2013
ABSTRACT: This paper is about releasing the social
imagination through art in education. This research examines possibilities to
use the aesthetic experience as a means to awaken students’ consciousness for
advancing democratic values, including multiple perspectives, freedom, and
responsibility. Drawing from Maxine Greene’s (1995, 2001) philosophy of social
imagination and aesthetic education, this inquiry aims to enrich discourse in
the field of curriculum studies, creativity, and citizenship education. Six
educators initiated a social imagination project separately. They designed,
implemented, and assessed a semester-long project founded in Greene’s
philosophy of social imagination. The participants challenged habitual ways of
thinking about self/other, culture, and community through active engagement
between art and the subject. The aesthetic encounters with art (a) fostered the
participants’ wide-awakeness about the society and (b) engaged participants to
imagining “things as if they could be otherwise” (Greene, 1995:p. 16). An emphasis on the aesthetic
experience through art contributes to advancing democratic values in a pluralistic
society.