As an educator, Maxine Greene returned repeatedly to the dynamic transaction that John Dewey had theorized between a vital social world and individual creativity. With Dewey, she viewed mutually transformative relations with others as the wellspring of all personal growth and social progress and as key to achieving a form of freedom that both scholars viewed in intellectual and moral terms. Greene strove continually to promote and realize this form of freedom within her own life and the lives of those around her and in contrast to most philosophers, including Dewey, chronicled aspects of her personal journey in hopes of inspiring and informing the efforts of others. In this article, Susan Mayer considers three of Greene's principal sets of commitments in this light: her work in teacher education, her use of autobiography, and her studied investigations of the arts. These commitments can, in emphasis, be seen to correspond loosely to the three notions joined in this paper's title: The social world, the creative self, and the ongoing achievement of freedom.