Paper Title
On Pedagogical imagination and its Transformative Potential: Reflections on the Work of Maxine Greene

Abstract
This paper will reflect on Maxine Greene’s extraordinary insights regarding her brilliant and innovative idea of “imagination” and its significance for a transformative pedagogy. Greene’s idea of “imagination” is full of aesthetics and encourages profound inquiry. It provides a sound basis for the theory and praxis of personal, pedagogical, and social transformation. Greene’s work is an excellent synthesis of diverse intellectual traditions based on the works of phenomenological-existentialists (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Rorty), critical theorists (Habermas, Marcuse, and Freire) and postmodernists (Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida). Developing her ideas on these philosophical and intellectual traditions, Greene underscores the importance of subjectivity and consciousness in educational experience, emphasizes the need for resistance against ideological, economic, and cultural reproduction through educational institutions, and recognizes the importance of going beyond grand narratives to understand the situatedness and contextuality of diverse viewpoints. Her scholarship becomes even richer due to her unique style of situating educational phenomena through works of art (novels, paintings, poetry, films and dramas). Greene’s work is a powerful critique of the behaviorist-positivist-empiricist ways of looking at educational experience (where the former has reduced the latter to performance on standardized testing and accountability measures which forces teachers and students to work as agents of social reproduction). A serious study of Greene’s work allows teacher educators to understand the importance of imagination in educational process. It enables teacher educators to release their creative imagination to awaken their consciousness for personal and pedagogical transformation. The current complicated conversations in teacher education and curriculum studies ask us to think about the direction we should move toward given the current neoliberal era which, on the one hand, values measurement, standardization, and accountability and, on the other hand, undermines freedom, creativity, and critical thinking. Greene’s work shows us a way out and encourages us to release our imaginations to collectively create not only a better educational environment but a better world. Greene’s philosophy, curriculum and pedagogy, I am sure, has the potential to lay the foundation of a democratic, just and peaceful world.