Moving Elementary Educators Beyond Laissez-Faire Discussion Toward a Commitment to Social Justice: Lesson Plans for the Dialectic of Freedom

Abstract

This article presents and offers rationale for two lesson plans/assignments for use with prospective and practicing elementary educators studying Maxine Greene’s The Dialectic of Freedom. The ultimate goal is to move our students, most of whom are white and middle-class, to a commitment to pursue social justice through their work with children. The author argues that her elementary education students both at Colgate University and now at SUNY Binghamton are marginalized in most assigned readings of critical theory and even feminist poststructuralist text, by convoluted language and the lack of any stated appreciation for their love of children, however initially romanticized. She proposes that a (currently) missing discourse of spirituality, modelled in The Dialectic of Freedom, might well prove to be the key to engaging the hearts and minds of our elementary education students whose work with young people increasingly requires the same complex classroom practice of the unknowable Elizabeth Ellsworth (Ellsworth, 1989) proposes for socialjustice seeking professors in their university classrooms. Further, the author calls for a willingness to problematize our conception of privilege so as to invite into our work non-Western conceptions of human growth and higher consciousness premised on closeness to nature and the body, precisely appropriate foundations, she suggests, for quality elementary education.