A quick announcement because one of the questions

provoked a good connection.

Rebecca is where?

Rebecca in the bottom here has pointed out

that there is a symposium here in Granoff Saturday, March

5 called Designing the Next Steps.

And it's a day of workshops, community classes, discussion,

design, lecture, demonstrations, and art installations.

Here's the part where it has particular relevance.

The ASaP Symposium explores holistic, artistic

interventions for diverse populations.

This year's focus is on the power

of design and implementation of arts programming

in the medical field.

So Rebecca has more information on this specific program.

You can go and seek her out.

But a nice corollary to this day, especially the connection

to the medical field a week from tomorrow.

Maxine Greene was an important inspiration

for many of us, philosopher of education and aesthetics,

spent the majority of her career at Teachers College, Columbia

and also importantly, at the Lincoln Center Institute

for the Arts in Education and wrote several books,

including one that I quoted from,

Releasing the Imagination.

In the back of your program, you see a list

of three other conferences, symposiums

that Community MusicWorks has been involved in presenting

over the last 15 or 16 years.

Each of them really focused on Maxine's work

in a different way.

She was a speaker at two of them and was a real inspiration

for Community MusicWorks and many other initiatives.

Maxine passed away in 2014 at the age of 96.

And there's a group really working

to keep her work and legacy in the minds of people

in the-- practitioners in the field.

And Heidi Upton is the president of this Maxine Greene

Center for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination.

So we are bringing this topic forward,

the legacy of Maxine Greene.

Though Karen and Paul aren't necessarily connected

to Maxine's work, it felt like the conversation

that we framed is very much one that Maxine would appreciate.

So very briefly again, bios are in the book.

But Heidi Upton is, as I said, the president of the Maxine

Greene Center and is an associate professor at St.

John's University in New York.

She'll describe more of this Discover New York class

that she teaches.

But important to the theme of the today,

Heidi is also an accomplished concert pianist

so is wearing two hats here today.

Karen Zone is the president of Longy School of Music,

which is now the Longy School of Music of Bard College and also

a concert pianist.

So there's a theme on that side of the panel here.

Karen was an associate provost at Berklee College of Music

and was at the MacPhail Center before that, really important

work that Karen is involved with and that she'll

talk about connected with the Sistema world

starting a MAT program to teach musicians

to be educators in this kind of new space

of Sistema-related work.

And we are honored that Paul Guyer

is with us from the Brown faculty, Johnathon Nelson

Professor in philosophy and humanities

who has recently, I think, published

the History of Aesthetics and will kind of provide

that frame for us at the end of this panel

into what sort of philosophical context

is some of this applied work.

So with that, let me welcome Heidi Upton.

[APPLAUSE]

I need a password.

[INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

OK, so much better.

Hi, everyone.

I first want to say how honored I am to be here and how excited

and how inspired I am so far listening to people who are not

just talking the talk but walking the walk

and really doing something.

This presentation that I'm about to give is a report, in a way,

on the partnership between-- or partnerships,

I should say-- between students in my course called

Discover New York and people who are homeless in New York City.

And I came to this undertaking from a position

at Lincoln Center Institute, which

is now called Lincoln Center Education, where

I was a teaching artist, a full-time teaching

artist for several years and where

I got to know Maxine Greene and learned

about aesthetic education, which is an approach to education.

And it is a methodology, which I'm

going to discuss a little bit as we move forward.

So the question I think that I would like to pose to you

and for you to think about and for me to address, first

of all, is this word aesthetic and the notion

of aesthetic experience, what that means

and how I think about it in my work.

So we're going to start with this.

Because this is something that I ask my students

at the beginning of every semester

is to notice the room that we're in.

And it's generally a room that's about that shape.

It's not like this room, which has a different shape.

But it's usually a lot right angles.

And it usually-- and it remarkably, looks

like this room, my classroom.

And I really have them look for a very long time

at the ceiling, which is filled with geometry.

And we begin the semester by just describing things.

And this is when my students think that this is really

a nut's course.

And maybe they should drop this one and take it from another.

Because Discover New York is something that all freshman

have to take at St. John's.

But each professor who teaches it

does it through their own lens of expertise.

And my expertise is aesthetic education.

So they're stuck with that.

So we describe the room.

And as I've been sitting here listening to everybody speak,

I've been looking at this space and thinking about situating

myself in its aesthetic space.

I think it was a line in a Beatles song.

You might correct me.

Is it, "The love you take is equal to the love you make?"

Do you know that line from the Revolver album?

Do I have it right or backwards?

I'm not sure.

But it's that philosophy.

It's that deep thinking.

It's that to the extent that one enters, that one gives oneself

to anything, that is to the extent that one receives.

And I think that's the way.

And Maxine used to say it with personal relationships.

And it's also just situating oneself in aesthetic space.

So I'm noticing a lot parallel lines

in here all over the place.

And I might say that there is a conversation

between parallel lines and horizontal and vertical.

So there are lot of horizontals and a lot of verticals.

And in my discussions with my students

about the room in which we sit, it moves from description

to analysis.

And then, maybe like, who decided

that there should be right angles

or that it should be this color or whatever

questions arise as we proceed in our inquiry

into aesthetic space.

So it's the qualities of things that I am thinking about

and that I want my students to think

about when we are thinking about aesthetic experience.

First, noticing the qualities of things.

And here is, for example, a thing, which is a shape.

And it's red.

And we could start to describe it.

And we could say that it's not uniform in color

and that there's some texture involved and everything.

But if you have ever read Maxine Greene's writings

or if you ever knew her, you know

that she is always referring to the work of others,

whether it be the work of philosophers, such as Dewey

and Sartre or the work of other artists.

And I captured this quotation from one person

that she references very often who

is Merleau-Ponty who was an existential phenomenologist.

Don't think that I really know what that means.

But that's what he was.

And that's what Maxine was.

And he is talking here about how there are so

many contingencies when you look at something, when you're

there, when you're putting yourself

in relationship to anything.

And that's very much what I want my students

to begin to think about that in the room, each of us

has something to say.

Each of us brings our cloud of experience.

And each of us has a unique perspective

on what is happening.

So Maxine is always talking about--

and I think that Sebastian mentioned this in his talk--

the idea of givens versus contingencies,

that in education-- whatever that is-- we are given, given.

You know, this is a fact.

Learn this.

But that perhaps we should approach these givens

as contingencies.

And so we never really know what we're looking at.

When we're looking a patch of red,

it might the eye of a bird.

And that bird might be escaping from a box.

Anyway, so Maxine Greene, what she said so often is,

I am what I am not yet, that we are always becoming.

And her description of situating oneself in aesthetic space

is up there in red.

And she, herself, asks the reader

to notice wherever we are, we can shift our understanding.

We can shift our consciousness into a moment of awareness

of aesthetic space.

Notice the sheen on the apple on the fruit stand.

And so it is this that inspires me

to inspire my students to be more in the moment,

to be mindful, to notice, to wake up.

So I know about aesthetic education

from be a teaching artist at Lincoln Center Institute.

And aesthetic education creates pathways

into transactions with works of art

using particular concepts embedded in that work of art

and teaching artists craft workshops

based on their inspiration of what

they find in a particular work of art,

which is the text understudy.

So there are four cornerstones in aesthetic education

and developing workshops.

And that is asking questions, making stuff-- art-making,

making things that are having to do with whatever

is in that work of art that's going to be met-- bringing

in contextual information, the world

out of which the work of art emerges, and a reflection.

What is it that we have done here?

What are we thinking about here?

So I brought that into my job at St. John's University

when I began there in 2003.

And I got to do whatever I wanted in Discover New York.

And it took me a while.

I first taught it in another way.

You can evolve the course as you wish.

And it was one day when I got off the subway

at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street actually

on my way to do an aesthetic education workshop at the Met

when I noticed on this cold January Saturday

morning that every bench and every little nook

and cranny along the way to the uptown bus on Madison Avenue

had a lump of person covered in clothing.

And it hit me like a thunderclap that what

I needed to do with my Discover New York course

was focus on homelessness in New York.

And I had to learn about it.

And then, I had to bring that to my students.

And so my little version of the course is DNYhome.

So much has been spoken about Dewey.

And there's Art as Experience again.

And he-- yes, it was inspiring to me