Teaching Philosophy
The Dialectic
of Freedom
The one book that shaped my personal pedagogy more than any other was Maxine Greene’s The Dialectic of Freedom. Picking up where Dewey left off in his emphasis on experiential education, Greene focused on the necessity of arts and aesthetics as a way of engaging the world. This approach has layered implications for students engaged both in art making and analysis. Through analysis, students engage artworks as an individualized experience, validating their own interpretations and allowing their interactions with the work to hold equal weight to a work’s historical and social contexts.
In this way, students understand one of the most important reasons artists create- to show their audiences something from a new and unexpected perspective. This understanding empowers students to speak from their own perspectives and leads to a second implication; the power of the student’s voice. Greene’s concept of an ‘open space’ is where this voice is translated from understanding into action and has been the most influential to my own personal philosophy. Modeled after her work, the “open space” in my classroom is where students have the autonomy to create a student centered response to the world around them.
Greene writes about how this response helps students understand the fundamental principals of participatory democracy. Through the process of responding to the world through their art, students begin to understand the connections between freedom and imagination; they learn to visualize conditions “that are not yet”. The outcome of these experiences is what she describes as a ‘wide-awakeness’ that prepares students to engage and feel empowered to impact the world around them.
On a practical level, I have integrated a more constructionist approach into my constructivist pedagogy as a way to work within that ‘open space’. This began at a professional development training I did at a Maker Space in Shenzhen, China. Here we asked to teach ourselves how to approach a problem though play. The challenges we experienced here, for example, making a record player with found objects and electronic circuit building block toys, forced us into a hands-on learning approach that made trial and error our teacher. I have integrated this approach into all aspects of my teaching, from traditional media to work in the maker space, and from independent student projects to group PBL work.
For these Open Spaces to be authentic, students must feel that their own experiences and identities are represented and valued. As a teacher in Shanghai and Santiago for the past 19 years, I have tailored my approach to DEIB to meet the needs, understandings, and cultural contexts of my students. International Schools have often been associated with a history of colonialism, and even to this day often emphasize and elevate a Western canon above the arts and academic work that are present in their host countries. For this reason, I am careful to expose them to a wide range of culturally diverse artists and art that deals with a diverse range of topics that are
relevant to marginalized groups. Many of these students will go on to live in much more diverse communities in college and beyond. It is critical to prepare them to value a diversity of voices and ideas in anticipation of life abroad. Secondly, I introduce them to a wide range of contemporary films and art from their own cultural identities, so that they can see themselves reflected in the work of practicing artists.