Learning Love

Thanks to Michael Wiggins of the ATA Blog for sharing this quote about love!

In his book, The Art of Loving, philosopher Erich Fromm writes:

"The first step is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?"

Collaborating with Kids with Behavioral Challenges

Been reading a little of this book: Love it. Great website, too.

bell hooks for kids = wonderful stuffs

Recently read this book with my students. How could I pass up a bell hooks children's book on love?

I asked the students to write a response to the prompt, "Homemade Love is..."

One student said:

Love is made of family and friends. My family is a caregiver.
My family is so funny!
This [is] how love is made. Is made of so many wonderful stuffs.

bell hooks on Radical Love & Buddhism

When I knew how to love the doors of my heart opened wide before the wind
Reality was calling out for revolution.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in the poem “The Fruit of Awareness Is Ripe”

I came across a great piece by bell hooks on Shambhala Sun, entitled Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love. hooks' touches on the emergence of the discussion of love within Buddhism, particularly from Thich Nhat Hanh. This love is not fluffy, romantic love. It is transformative and revolutionary love--so similar to that which Freire speaks of.

When lecturing on ending domination around the world, listening to the despair and hopelessness, I asked individuals who were hopeful to talk about what force in their life pushed them to make a profound transformation, moving them from a will to dominate toward a will to be compassionate. The stories I heard were all about love. That sense of love as a transformative power was also present in the narratives of individuals working to create loving personal relationships. Writing about metta, “love” or “loving-kindness,” as the first of the brahmaviharas, the heavenly abodes, Sharon Salzberg reminds us in her insightful book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness that “In cultivating love, we remember one of the most powerful truths the Buddha taught … that the forces in the mind that bring suffering are able to temporarily hold down the positive forces such as love or wisdom, but they can never destroy them.… Love can uproot fear or anger or guilt, because it is a greater power. Love can go anywhere. Nothing can obstruct it.” Clearly, at the end of the nineties an awakening of heart was taking place in our nation, our concern with the issue of love evident in the growing body of literature on the subject.

Because of the awareness that love and domination cannot coexist, there is a collective call for everyone to place learning how to love on their emotional and/or spiritual agenda. We have witnessed the way in which movements for justice that denounce dominator culture, yet have an underlying commitment to corrupt uses of power, do not really create fundamental changes in our societal structure. When radical activists have not made a core break with dominator thinking (imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy), there is no union of theory and practice, and real change is not sustained. That’s why cultivating the mind of love is so crucial. When love is the ground of our being, a love ethic shapes our participation in politics.

To work for peace and justice we begin with the individual practice of love, because it is there that we can experience firsthand love’s transformative power. Attending to the damaging impact of abuse in many of our childhoods helps us cultivate the mind of love. Abuse is always about lovelessness, and if we grow into our adult years without knowing how to love, how then can we create social movements that will end domination, exploitation, and oppression? John Welwood shares the insight in Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships that many of us carry a “wound of the heart” that emerged in childhood conditioning, creating “a disconnection from the loving openness that is our nature.” He explains: “This universal wound shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, or depression, and in relationships as the mood of unlove.… On the collective level, this deep wound in the human psyche leads to a world wracked by struggle, stress, and dissension.… The greatest ills on the planet—war, poverty, economic injustice, ecological degradation—all stem from our inability to trust one another, honor differences, engage in respectful dialogue, and reach mutual understanding.” Welwood links individual failure to learn how to love in childhood with larger social ills; however, even those who are fortunate to love and be loved in childhood grow to maturity in a culture of domination that devalues love.

Continue here!

Judicious and Radical Love in Teaching

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word "judicious" means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.

-M. Scott Peck
The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Love, Love, Love: Part 4

After taking a look at the question of love and teaching, delving into Freire's concept of radical love, and getting together a background on applied theatre, I tried to break down the concept of radical love in the applied theatre space.

I've made connections between radical love and applied theatre by looking at four areas:

• Courage, Envisioning and Imagining Change
• Community Work
• Facilitating Challenging Dialogue
• Representation of the Other

Courage, Envisioning and Imagining

As I began to explore the idea of radical love in my own practice as an applied theatre practitioner and through conversation with other practitioners, the first recognition was that the context in which Freire spoke and wrote was certainly very different than that of my own. Christina Marin, Assistant Professor of Educational Theatre at New York University, noted that coming into the applied theatre or Theatre of the Oppressed space from a privileged and academic perspective is quite different from the original context of Freire’s pedagogy and Boal’s adaptation in the theatre (personal communication, April 3, 2009). The Instructional Coordinator of the Adult Learning Center at Lehman College’s Institute for Literacy Studies spoke of her frustration applying Freire’s pedagogy within a modern context:

It is very hard to feel like you are doing something radical and revolutionary in times where people are not rising up at all, but trying to survive and fit in and be successful within the system. I think it would be much more like Freire to teach within the context of social change movements, than the kind of teaching that I do. (personal communication, July 14, 2009)

Thus, our adaptation or judgment of the applicability of Freire’s radical love may be skewed by our belief that we are not in a revolutionary context or time of major social change. Are we in the context of a social change movement? And should we be? Do we believe in the potential for change in the present context?

Oppression may carry a different meaning at the present time within Western culture than it did in Freire’s historical context. In Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (5th Edition), Peter McLaren (1998) offers a newer take on oppression that sees oppression beyond the deliberate practice of evil (p. 18). McLaren (1998) states, “oppression can exist even in the absence of overt discrimination” and is perpetuated by well-meaning individuals in the routine decisions of life (p.18).

Consequently, it may be more difficult to contextualize radical love in a situation where oppression is not so obvious or palpable. In recognition of this in her own work, one adult literacy coordinator concludes,

It’s a different book now that would be written. [Pedagogy of the Oppressed is] a product of history, when we really felt like the whole world was going to have a socialist revolution, and it was so obvious that this was going to happen and people were going to embrace it. And now, that’s not so obvious. They always used think that revolution was right around the corner, and I’d love to feel that way again. (personal communication, July 14, 2009)

In the re-contextualization of Freire’s radical love, the concept of revolution may be outdated or irrelevant for some educators coming from an American standpoint. It may be more difficult for us to envision dramatic, revolutionary change in our communities and societies. Still, Freire (1998) encourages us that love breeds bravery that inspires us to try “a thousand times before giving up” (p. 3). Yet, in order to persist, we must be able to envision liberation.

Envisioning another future requires believing in the possibility of change—change that can be brought about through education, and in our work, through the use of theatre. Marin describes this poetically as “love of the potential” (personal communication, April 3, 2009). She continues to describe this as, “loving what can be. What we haven’t achieved yet. And if you feel that kind of love for a potential, you work harder toward it and you work more in community toward it“ (personal communication, April 3, 2009). In the applied theatre context, potential is explored in a theatrical dialogue.

According to Boal (2002), “Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it” (p. 16). By reflecting on our lives, our world and our actions within the world, exchanging ideas, pondering alternative realities, and trying out and rehearsing possible options and solutions to oppressive situations, theatre can transform communities and help us to create new possibilities.

Appropriately, the imagination is at the center of social change, the foundation for the ability to love and persist in the creation of a new world. In Releasing the Imagination, philosopher and social critic Maxine Greene (2000) shares,

it may be the recovery of imagination that lessens the social paralysis we see around us and restores the sense that something can be done in the name of what is decent and humane. My attention turns back to the importance of wide-awakeness, of awareness of what it is to be in the world. (p. 35)

It is difficult to scientifically measure the change that the power of the imagination, personal connections, dialogue, human interaction and trust can spark. These scientific measurements are the ones that our society currently values and privileges. But it is even more difficult to argue that personal connections, dialogue, human interaction and trust are meaningless. Humans are the most powerful tools in social change—the only tools.

To recognize the sacredness of the human ability to identify and reflect is to place a profound respect toward our ability to transform our communities, our world and ourselves. In order to truly engage in loving action that leads to liberation and transformation, we must first believe in the possibility of change. In the applied theatre realm, that possibility can be articulated with dramatic techniques.

Up next: Exploring Community Work.

Resources:

Love, Love, Love: Part 3

Before delving more into the connections between radical love and applied theatre, I thought it was important examine the background of the applied theatre. (Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.)

Applied theatre engages participants in critical reflection on their society, their relationships, or their communities and poses problems and explores solutions (Taylor, 2003). It activates human consciousness through participation and observation, rather than observation alone (Taylor, 2003; Boal, 1985). Philip Taylor (2003) argues, “the applied theatre operates from a central transformative principle” (p. 1). Within these explorations and dialogue, theatre is the language that is utilized (Taylor, 2003).

Augusto Boal (1985) adapted Freire’s pedagogy into the theatrical space with the creation of Forum Theatre, a dialogical and participatory form of theatre in which the typical audience is transformed from spectators to participants or “spect-actors.” In his book Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Boal (2002) offers his concept of theatre:

in its most archaic sense, theatre is the capacity possessed by human beings—and not by animals—to observe themselves in action. Humans are capable of seeing themselves in the act of seeing, of thinking their emotions, of being moved by their thoughts. They can see themselves here and imagine themselves there; they can see themselves today and imagine themselves tomorrow. (p. 11)

Theatre, in this sense, is tied to action, reflection, and imagination.
Boal (2002) claims, “To identify is to be able not only to recognise within the same repetitive context but also to extrapolate to other contexts; to see beyond what the eye sees, to hear beyond what the ear hears, to feel beyond what touches the skin, to think beyond what words mean” (p. 12). Applied theatre as a human activity of identification means thorough examination, thinking beyond current patterns, breaking those patterns, and exploring new ones (Taylor, 2003; Nicholson, 2005; Boal, 2002).

Applied theatre practice often takes place within marginalized and oppressed communities and untraditional spaces such as prisons, hospitals, and other community centers (Rohd, 1998; Taylor, 2003; Nicholson, 2005; Boal, 1985). Because the work takes place in such a range of settings, artists often work with communities of which they are not a part. Consequently, it is important that artists explore the dynamic of insider/outsider and respect for the community within which they are working (Cohen-Cruz, 2005), harkening back to Freire’s (2000) concept of genuine dialogue and opening up the self to the other.

Radical Love in the Applied Theatre Space

To explore the concept of radical love in the applied theatre space, I reached out to other practitioners and continued to review applicable literature in the field of education and theatre. I have organized these thoughts into four that struck me:

• Courage, Envisioning and Imagining Change
• Community Work
• Facilitating Challenging Dialogue
• Representation of the Other

Resources to check out:

Love, Love, Love: Part 2

Today, we continue with our second installment on Love. See part one here.

To continue exploring the relationship between radical love and arts education/applied theatre, let's take a closer look at radical love from Freire's perspective.

Freire (1998) overtly refers to teaching as an act of love and claims that teaching is impossible without a “well-thought-out capacity to love” (p.3).

Freire’s philosophy of education contends that education must contain horizontal dialogical relationships, in which the dialogue is rooted in love for the world and for people (Freire, 2000; McClaren, 1999). Within this dialogical concept, the self is opened up to the other (McClaren, 1999). Freire (2000) warns, “Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself” (p. 89-90). Without love, true dialogue is impossible. Freire (2000) offers, “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical” (p. 89). Commitment to others (rather than a fashionable social cause or issue) is the foundation of liberation; acts of courage, change, and dialogue are all acts of love.

Kincheloe (2004) describes this concept as “radical love” (p. 3), commenting, “Such a love is compassionate, erotic, creative, sensual, and informed. Critical pedagogy uses it to increase our capacity to love, to bring the power of love to our everyday lives and social institutions, and to rethink reason in a humane and interconnected manner” (p. 3). Revolutionary or radical love must liberate; it is struggle, and encourages and fuels more struggle (McClaren, 1999).

Antonia Darder (2002) reflects on Freire’s use of the word love. She argues that Freire’s love challenges the restrictive fear of freedom that is present in so many of us; it is characterized by vulnerability and struggle (p. 499). McLaren (1999) posits that “authentic love opens up the self to the Other” (p. 171). With this opening up of the self comes solidarity and struggle for liberation.

Freire (2000) offers that, “[a]s individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of the humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity….. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence” (p. 45). McLaren (1999) also mentions the political and active nature of Freire’s vision of love: “a love for humankind that remains disconnected from a liberatory politics does a profound disservice to its object” (p. 171). Love is connected to that which is political and that which is active.

Consequently, in opposition to love and dialogue, lies oppression. “Sadistic love is a perverted love—a love of death, not of life. One of the characteristics of the oppressor consciousness and its necrophilic view of the world is thus sadism. As the oppressor consciousness, in order to dominate, tries to deter the drive to search, the restlessness, and the creative power which characterize life, it kills life” (Freire, 2000, p. 59-60). Oppression stifles dialogue, creativity, and the ability to name the world.

It appears that love, from Freire’s perspective includes a specific open relationship to the other, as well as actions that seek freedom and liberation through intense struggle. According to McLaren (1999), “revolutionary love is always pointed in the direction of commitment and fidelity to a global project of emancipation” (p. 171). Love is not simply feeling, it is action.

Love, Love, Love: Part 1

I've been working on research surrounding Paulo Freire's concept of radical love in relation to teaching. I presented a bit of this at the AATE Conference last week. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to share some short installments of the research (a work in progress.)

“It is impossible to teach without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love. (Freire, 1998, p.3)

If you’d have told me two years ago that I’d be writing a research paper on love, I might have laughed. And while I still consider it amusing to ponder the subject, I find it important, difficult, intriguing, and critical to discover what love means in my own practice as a teaching artist—if it means anything at all.

Paulo Freire’s writings, philosophy, and practice have deeply influenced my pedagogy and practice as a drama educator. Peter McClaren (2000) maintains that Freire’s “unshamed stress on the power of love” (p. 171) makes him unique among other progressive and leftist educators. Freire (1998) argues, “It is impossible to teach without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love" (p. 3). But what is a thoughtful capacity to love? What does Freire mean? How does love relate to my own pedagogy?

In A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman maintains:

As a society, we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush. Why should we be ashamed of an emotion so beautiful and natural? Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet, we’re reluctant to linger over its name. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly. On the other hand, we have many sharp verbs for the ways in which human beings can hurt one another…. Our vocabulary of love and lovemaking is so paltry that a poet has to choose among clichés…. Fortunately, this has led to some richly imagined works of art. It has inspired poets to create their own private vocabularies. (p. xix)

How appropriate is it that we, as teaching artists, theatre practitioners, actors, and educators explore and create our own vocabulary of love? Or are we too, ashamed of something that appears to be too gushy, silly, or emotional?

“Whoever sets out to write about love is taking the biggest risk of his or her life.” (Isn’t it Romantic, 2004, p. 17). I write this paper is because I want to know what love means for Freire, other educators, and me. Perhaps my exploration of my own definition of love will help you to agree, disagree, and ponder the meaning and concept of love within your own educational practice.

Up next: Freire’s concept of radical love and the roots of applied theatre.

School for Designing a Society & Patch Adams

I'm currently researching Paulo Freire's concept of radical love in relation to teaching the arts, specifically in relation to facilitating applied theatre. Patch Adams, doctor, health care activist and clown, conducts a workshop called "What is your love strategy?"

His organization also pairs with The School for Designing a Society. Every school (for little kids and big kids) should have something like this. Amazing--I want to go!

The School for Designing a Society, established in 1991, is a project of teachers, performers, artists, and activists. It is an ongoing experiment in making temporary living environments where the question "What would I consider a desirable society?" is given serious playful thought, and taken as an input to creative projects.

Why a desirable society?

We want to address people: our neighbors and our distant neighbors who, living in the current social system, find that this system maintains itself at the expense of its members so that misery, poverty, hopelessness, violence, and human degradation are daily occurrences. Our social system tells us that human beings are the problem, and that it, the current system, is the solution. We have taken long looks at this system, and we do not want it. As any social system is humanly created, not natural, and is maintained daily by human action, we wish to create new social systems, and to change our daily patterns of action.

Why design?

Criticisms of the problems of the present society are often met with justifications. Once these justifications fail, many a conversation of hopeful intention is stopped with the (final) statement: "The present organization of society is the best we have", or the question: "Do you have a better idea?"

This is a moment of possibility and not one to be left speechless. Indeed, many a time, the respondent finds herself sputtering, filled with a spirit of rebellion which unfortunately gets watered down to the mere language of complaint.

Having had the time and opportunity to create--in conjunction with others of diverse experiences--detailed maps, dreams, plans, scripts, scores, videos, and blueprints of her desirable society, we imagine the situation could go differently.

Imagine an atmosphere of audacity: She's asked the question: "Do you have a better idea?" Everyone taking a coffeebreak looks at her or their shoes. She looks the interlocutor in the eye and reaches into her purse? knapsack? briefcase? kitchen drawer? for a booklet of proposals, slaps it on the table scattering cigarette butts, and answers: "Here, read this--this will give you an idea of what I want."