Love, Love, Love: Part 6

Thanks to ATA Blog for making me remember that I haven't finished sharing on this topic.

This post is about Facilitating Challenging Dialogue in the applied theatre, with love.

Here's the background: 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

Find the links to the previous posts here.

Here's my bit on Facilitating Challenging Dialogue...

To engage in true openness, listening, and dialogue to represent love in action, we must risk spaces of discomfort. In examining power and privilege, oppression, marginalization, abuse, violence and other topics, applied theatre work often ventures to places that are uncomfortable for facilitators and participants. As practitioners, we must embrace this space, but maintain its safety.

In “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” bell hooks identifies the margin as a space for resistance. She notes that the margin is “much more than a site of deprivation…it is also the site of radical possibility.” Yet, embracing marginality may be a space of uneasiness for some—but discomfort can be the most radical place for learning. Dr. Christina Marin of NYU's Educational Theatre Program challenges participants to acknowledge that through discomfort, amazing possibilities can be uncovered:

If you are willing to be uncomfortable, which I believe is one of the best places in which to explore, if you’re willing to, and you don’t try and put the band-aid on it, you don’t try to cover it up, you don’t try and dismiss it and negate it, you don’t try and get past it to get to the comfortable part too quickly. Sometimes we have to sit in that zone of discomfort because that’s where we can examine how we can find the road together.

Michael Rhod (of Sojourn Theatre) points out that it is the facilitator’s responsibility to maintain a safe space throughout discomfort, to “be aware and fiercely observant, proactive, porous, and at the same time recognize that there are some moments that you have to let tumble forward…” When the facilitator is a part of the circle, rather than outside of it, the facilitator demonstrates risk alongside participants. With this courage to risk, facilitators and participants engage in the vulnerable and courageous act of love that McLaren (1997) and Antonia Darder characterize as radical love.

Throughout the applied theatre experience, the facilitator is responsible for creating and maintaining a safe space in concert with participants. The artists’ responsibilities amplify when applied theatre work results in performance where there exist implications with the way we represent the other.

Looking Closely at Harlem Children's Zone

City Limits' March issue takes a little bit more of a critical look at HCZ.

Maxine Greene, my love

via ATA Blog:

An excerpt from How Do We Think About Our Craft?, an essay by Maxine Greene published by Teachers College, Columbia University.

"Gradually becoming aware of all this, we are beginning to recognize that every young person must be encountered as a center of consciousness, even as he or she is understood to be a participant in an identifiable social world. Each one may be encountered as a being who is at once a distinctive individual and someone whose consciousness opens out to the common, an intersubjective world in which he or she is inextricably involved."

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?"

Emotions, Memory, and Learning

I was recently skimming a book on what teachers should know about how the brain works. (I need to find the title--I know I wrote it down somewhere.) The part that really stood out to me (even though it makes total sense) is that we are more likely to remember something/put it into our memory if there is emotion tied to it. We are likely to remember that with which we have an emotional connection. Duh.

Still, this makes me think about how the arts can be so crucial in learning. Experiencing a process drama about Ruby Bridges' and school integration vs. reading about it. Listening to or learning music from the Civil Rights area. Problem solving using Forum Theatre. All of these evoke emotions as a tool and a way of learning, and an avenue to remembering.

Here's a quick read on Educational Leadership: Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers.

Our brain pays more attention to stimuli and events that are accompanied by emotions. We remember the best and worst things that happen to us while forgetting emotionally neutral events. Do you remember what you ate for lunch two weeks ago last Thursday? Probably not, unless it was a special occasion or the food made you sick. In either case, the accompanying emotions enabled you to remember it.

How we feel about a learning situation often affects attention and memory more quickly than what we think about it. In most adolescents, the brain region that processes emotions (the limbic area) is fully operational, whereas the regions responsible for thinking, reflecting, and controlling emotional reactions (located in the prefrontal cortex) are still developing. This is why middle school students overtly display emotions inappropriately in the classroom (through pained sighs, rolling eyes, and blank looks).

And another: The Role of Emotions in Learning. This one talks mainly about the way that fear/joy can affect our ability to learn and open up avenues to learning.

Here's an article on Memory, Music and Emotion in Learning.

p-l-a-y

Great, great, great Susan Engel & NY Times.

So important to recognize that what we teach and the way we teach is not aligned to what we know about child development.

Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

Discovering Race Relations

Here are some resources that could be applicable during Black History Month. RaceBridges offers a spectrum of lesson ideas from looking at Obama's speech on race to looking at the history of discrimination against Native Americans in Alaska.

I hate this article.

Is that mean of me to say?

I just don't think Flanagan gets the point of experiential education.

Applied Theatre Blog

A doctoral student from NYU's educational theatre program blogs about what is happening in the applied theatre course in Puerto Rico. Very informative.

Collaborating with Kids with Behavioral Challenges

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

Check out Lincoln Center Institute

I was reading a bit about LCI's summer workshops-- The LCI International Educator Workshop.

I want to go!

Discover how to unlock imaginative learning through engaging with works of art. Find new excitement in your teaching practice. Share the insights of professional artists. Lay down paint, move to a beat, try on a stage character, invent your own music, improvise in a group or solo, and enjoy research. Immerse yourself in a sustained encounter with works of dance, music, theater, or visual art.

This workshop will help you to discover how to elicit new ideas in your students, and how to stimulate creative, conceptual thinkers prepared for the world beyond the classroom. Just imagine…

The Lincoln Center Institute International Educator Workshops will be held in New York City and at host sites in the United States and other countries. The New York City International Educator Workshop at Lincoln Center Institute will be held May 17–21; June 28–July 2; and July 12–16.

Introductory-Level Workshops are offered to any educator, artist, school or arts administrator, curriculum developer, and college and university professor from any national or international location. View the 2009 Introductory-Level brochure (PDF) for more information and as a preview of the 2010 Workshop.

Also, while reading, checked out their newest publication-

Such a Maxine Greene title. Visit the book's website for more. Here's a bit:

Know your enemy; it is you, scared.

Fear kills imagination. And fear is always with us. Pretending it doesn’t exist might work in a pinch, but eventually it returns. Learning to name, face, grapple with our fears: this is the start of the art of everything.

Because imagination is related to images, and images are related to the brain, it is logical to think of imagination as a purely cognitive capacity. But imagination is equally about emotion. It is about the animal instincts of fight or flight. It originates in the gut, in the chemical explosions that precede conscious thought. When you can overcome fear, you earn a chance to exercise your imagination. When you can’t, you don’t...

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.

Support ATA

Support the Association of Teaching Artists- led by Dale Davis- she rocks!

Here's a little post I stole from ATA's fabulous blogger Michael Wiggins. I like what Phil wrote at the beginning- quite poetic.

I'm not a teaching artist right now... but I am in spirit!

Why I Support ATA

By Phil Alexander

The soloist enchants us, while the choir provides us with incomparable depth and richness.

The poem delights us, while the book creates an entirely new universe for us.

The sculpture engages us, while the museum opens us up to brand new understandings.

The lesson teaches us, while the whole course transforms us.

Simply put, collective action reaches us deeper and lasts longer than individual experiences.

ATA is the embodiment of collective action, it's a collective voice, a unified chorus of individuals who often cannot be heard. The incomparable listserve , the ATA website, and the blog are just a few of the most obvious tools in which ATA collects and shares the voices of teaching artists. The
board and staff of ATA are committed to hearing the needs of teaching artists, and sharing your concerns with the world at large. We have plans to provide more opportunities and events for teaching artists in the future, such as the first Teaching Artists conference, but with assorted financial challenges, everything must be reconsidered and no opportunity is secure.

During this period of appeals and gift giving, it's hard to claim that one cause is more worthy than others. So I'm left asking this question: What will be heard, if ATA"s voice is silenced?

Philip A. Alexander, Ph.D.
Senior Program Officer
ESP Office of Partnership Support and Research
www.espartsed.org

Speaking of Communities

Interesting piece on Community Arts Network: The Choices We Have and Our Privilege To Move On.

By Laura D. Cohen

The ability to choose to enter a community, to make art and to leave once a project or session is complete or things get “too hard” is a privilege of the outsider community artist. When working in a community that is different from our own, it is essential to reflect, address and confront our own privilege in order to become conscious and committed to the work and to the community.

Love, Love, Love: Part 5

It's been about two months. But here's Part 5. In Part 4, I started exploring the first connection I saw between radical love and applied theatre: Courage, Envisioning and Imagining Change.

Just a re-cap on the last four installments: First, I rambled about the question of love and teaching, dove into Freire's concept of radical love, and got together a background on applied theatre. I've tried to sum it up by making connections between radical love and applied theatre in four areas:

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

So, this post is about Community Work in the applied theatre. How is community work practiced with love?

How do we create a hope of what can be in communion with others? How can we, as educators or teaching artists approach and work in community with new groups? Freire (2000) maintains that educators must enact this work with dialogue as the foundation.

A loving approach to community work requires an immense amount of self-awareness, reflection and openness. Michael Rohd, of Sojourn Theatre, offers,

one way to talk about love is with the generosity of spirit and humility that one has to enter any space or community or circle that you’ve been invited to. If you approach something with any interest to consciously or subconsciously manifest power, be in control or own something, then you are operating out of greed or fear. I think that love becomes a powerful way to attempt to move beyond your own greed and fear and think about what you can give and receive. It’s incredibly challenging to enter situations with love. You have to work to love. (personal communication, April 9, 2009)

Approaching an applied theatre residency without an agenda and with openness requires true listening and humility, both of which lead to and require genuine love. In conversations and literature about love, listening is often referenced. The listening that is required when first engaging and approaching unfamiliar communities is not a one-time occurrence.

Anne Bogart (2007) discusses the importance of attentiveness and listening in the work of directors and actors. She posits, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself.” In looking, listening, and feeling with attentiveness we deeply appreciate others. Henry Miller offers,

The one gift we can give another human being is our attention, and that attention, in turn, allows the possibility of change. We can be available and open to their change. Which means concurrently that we will change too. The gift we give is not to hold on to some way we have decided that this person is. Perhaps this gift of attention is also a gift of love. (as cited in Bogart, 2007, p 60-61)

Dialogue in an applied theatre setting---be it verbal or non-verbal (image theatre, etc.)—must be approached with this attentiveness. Rohd notes that dialogue occurs when participants are truly open to change; change is not a neccesary outcome, but must exists a genuine possibility for transformation (personal communication, April 9, 2009). The applied theatre space must create a context in which this openness and potential for transformation can take place.

Check out these fab books:

Compassion

Via Michael Wiggins at ATA Blog, check out the Charter for Compassion, whose road was paved by Karen Armstrong. You can also watch a series of talks by people around the world. Enjoy.

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

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

Meditations for Teachers

A month since I've blogged = major teaching stress.

As long as space endures,
And as long as sentient beings exist,
May I also abide,
That I may heal with my heart
The miseries of the world.

-A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

I walk, I fall down, I get up, Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

-Rabbi Hillel

Imprints

Saw this as I was walking today in Brooklyn.