Riall Lecture Series Presents Dr. Maxine Greene on Wednesday, March 8

SALISBURY, MD---Dr. Maxine Greene, who has been called "the preeminent American philosopher of education today," is the next E. Pauline Riall lecturer at Salisbury State University. Her talk, "The Reach of Imagination: Linking the Arts to Social Justice," is Wednesday, March 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Holloway Hall Auditorium. A reception follows. Admission is free.

Greene, Professor Emerita at Columbia University, is the author of several books including Releasing the Imagination, The Dialectic of Freedom and Landscapes of Learning. The latter is a "classic," said Dr. Joel Jones, SSU interim president. He considers Greene "the strongest living embodiment of the progressive tradition" in education, which goes back to Emerson, William James and John Dewey.

According to William C. Ayers and Janet Miller, editors of A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, "her prolific outpouring of articles and books, her prodigious lecture schedule and her ongoing teaching responsibilities have had an enormous impact on generations of teachers, researchers, academics and school reform activists.

"Because her field is by nature boundary crossing ... she has unique influence in a range of worlds: arts and aesthetics, literature and literary studies, cultural studies and school change," among others.

"Maxine Greene invites us to ‘do philosophy' to struggle with ideas, with the arts, with the events of the world, with the daily newspapers and our idiosyncratic chance encounters ... to act on what we find, to be a participant in the world."

On the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, since 1966, Greene has taught courses in social philosophy, the philosophy and history of education, literature, writing, aesthetics and education. She held the William F. Russell Chair in the Foundations of Education. She founded the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education. A sought-after speaker here and abroad, she is a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society, the American Educational Studies Association and the American Educational Research Association. Her academic awards include a Delta Gamma Kappa Award for Teacher as Stranger as the "Educational Book of the Year" in 1974, two Phi Delta Kappa "Teacher of the Year" awards, the Teachers College Medal and several honorary doctorates.

For more information call the SSU Public Relations Office at 410-543-6030.