Social and cultural progress require vision. In order to change the world, we must first have the ability and confidence to imagine the world differently.
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Imagination . . . is the possibility of looking at things as if they could be otherwise. (Greene 16)
Creating freedom, for oneself or for others, is always an act of imagination, of envisioning, of creating a new world. (Greene) Imaginative knowledge is a way of perceiving the world, relating to the world and changing the world. (Nafisi) The role of imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the originally unseen, unheard, and unexpected. (Greene 28) |
All writers, no matter their age or experience with language, have valuable experiences, ideas, imaginings, and voices.
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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. Keep the channel open. (Graham) |
Our assessment-focused, competitive culture reduces writers to students; we must provide opportunities for writers to reposition themselves as writers.
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Inauthentic writing experiences are disempowering because they keep student writers students. (Bomer and Bomer 4).
Seeing schooling small is preoccupied with test scores, “time on task,” management procedures, ethnic and racial percentages, and accountability measures, while it screens out the faces and gestures of individuals, of actual living persons. (Greene 11) The world perceived from one place is not the world. (Greene 20) |
Choice in the classroom validates writers’ experiences and empowers writers to name their worlds, to change their worlds, and perhaps to change the world.
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Writing to an assigned topic, no matter how “good” the teacher thinks the assignment, is, from the writer’s perspective, largely if not entirely an act of compliance rather than a linguistic doing meant to affect the world. (Bomer and Bomer 3)
Acculturating students to becoming active, involved, purposeful, deliberative citizens requires that they be allowed to make decisions about what they are learning and what they are doing. (Bomer and Bomer 3) Yet the eager teachers do appear and reappear--teachers who provoke learners to pose their own questions, to teach themselves, to go at their own pace, to name their worlds. (Greene 11) |
Innovative, non-traditional, experimental poetry can lay the groundwork for the visionary thinking that is essential for actualizing change, whether personal, local, or global.
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Art encodes what is important to people in the border between the personal and the public. On momentous social occasions, it is more likely that a poem, a song, or a story, not rhetoric, will linger in public memory. Poetry is better able than an editorial, a letter to the mayor, even a legal brief, to changes hearts and minds. Only poetry has the grace to be said at funerals and weddings, to mark the transformations in peoples’ lives, to say what cannot be said. (Bomer and Bomer 3)
Poetry should be made by all. (Lautréamont) |
Taxonomy of visionary thinking
Awareness
Voice
Perspective
Vision
Agency
Action
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"The world exists."
"I am in the world."
"Others are in the world."
"The world could change."
"I can change the world."
"I have changed the/my world."
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Works Cited
Bomer, Randy, and Katherine Bomer. For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 2001.
Collom, Jack, and Sheryl Noethe. Poetry Everywhere. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1994.
Graham, Martha. Personal conversation between Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille. 1943.
Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Lautréamont, Comte de, psuedonym for Isidore-Lucien Ducasse. 1846-1870. Origin of quote unknown.
Nafisi, Azar. “New Reading Standards Aim to Prep Kids for College--But at What Cost?” Weekends on All Things Considered. National Public Radio. 19 January 2013.
Collom, Jack, and Sheryl Noethe. Poetry Everywhere. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1994.
Graham, Martha. Personal conversation between Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille. 1943.
Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Lautréamont, Comte de, psuedonym for Isidore-Lucien Ducasse. 1846-1870. Origin of quote unknown.
Nafisi, Azar. “New Reading Standards Aim to Prep Kids for College--But at What Cost?” Weekends on All Things Considered. National Public Radio. 19 January 2013.