It saddens me to announce, for those of you who do not already know, that the wonderful scholar and person, Maxine Greene, passed away this past Thursday (March 29, 2014) due to pneumonia. Maxine was Professor Emeritus and the Founder and Director of the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. She was also past president of the Philosophy of Education Society, the American Educational Studies Association, and the American Educational Research Association, as well as a member of the National Academy of Education and the recipient of nine honorary doctoral degrees. She died at the age of 96.
To view a short video of an interview I conducted with her three years ago at her home in Manhattan, please see this three minute YouTube clip of the interview highlights here. To view more, including the full interview, her photo gallery, reflections of her family and friends, etc. please visit her page on the the Inside the Academy website here.
Her most poignant quote from these interviews, as they related to the purposes of this blog? “I’m not the kind of teacher who wants to impose an authority on people. I suppose I’ll never stop trying to wake people up to ask questions and have passion about how they look at the world.”
She will be greatly missed by all!
Maxine’s death is an impressive and irreplaceable loss to Teachers College, but not just to that institution. All of American education has profited from her incisive analyses of the past and present and her brilliant forays into the future. The entire profession will recognize her death as an intense personal and community loss . As a Ph.D. graduate of George Peabody College for Teachers, I never had the good fortune to have had Maxine as my teacher. On the other hand, we became good friends during the past 58 years and enjoyed hours of happy. serious conversations at professional meetings across the nation. These conversations, had they carried a TC course number, would have added not just my name to the long roster of her former students, but they would have added, also, names of most of my doctoral advisees and many friends who simply could not imagine an AERA or Kappa Delta Pi meeting without our “time with Maxine”. All of us knew more and felt better about the future during and following our interactions with her. What a person! What a major scholar! What a great friend!
See also an article we published in Teachers College Record capturing her work and self in much more depth here: http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17555
…and her obituary in today’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/nyregion/maxine-greene-teacher-and-educational-theorist-dies-at-96.html?_r=1