Category: General Learning

 

• Seattle Friends – Check this workshop with Meg Wheatley, 9/26-28, on Hope and Freedom. http://www.nalandawest.org/events/meg-wheatley-avoiding-the-ambush-of-hope/ …
• For those working with homeless issues, Andrew Heben’s Tent City Urbanism is a helpful read. http://www.tentcityurbanism.com  Thx @tomatlee.
• Check this STIA Webinar with Meg Wheatley on silence, compliance, brave action, and the human spirit. http://stiatemenos.com/webinars/ 
• I’ve posted a few short videos on The Circle Way, featuring Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. Use as inspired. http://tennesonwoolf.com/the-circle-way/ .
• Jerry Granelli #ALIA2014 on Practise: “Nice try. Try again.”
• Dan Siegel at #ALIA2014: “A healthy mind is an integrated mind. Presence is the portal to integration.” An idea still sticking with me
• “No amount of the finite is enough to compensate for the loss of the infinite.” Charles Eisenstein at #ALIA2014
• Strong article featuring Utah climate activist Tim DeChristopher: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-power-of-story/boomers-failed-us-america-s-most-creative-climate-criminal-anger-love?utm_source=YTW&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20140530 …
• Enjoying Mary Oliver poetry. This about Bob Dylan.”Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.”

I like this paragraph from Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft. I used it to close a two-day team retreat that I was hosting last week.

“The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift, your true self, is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And, it is all the world needs.”

I’ve been writing a lot the last month, organizing a draft of an Art of Hosting resource book, customized for some of the faith community people I’ve worked with the last three years. Part of that includes description of useful principles and agreements.

One such principle that I’ve noticed important in a number of environments is our overall relationship with complexity. Limited to one paragraph, I found myself writing this:

Don’t blame each other for complexity. What if complexity were just complexity? Multiple relations in multiple networks of people in multiple timelines that don’t always line up conveniently. As human beings, we try to look for simplifications in our plans. Often, we project our desire for a kind of simplicity onto situations that will never be as simple as we like. It’s a bit like saying rocket science is as simple as a match and some fuel. That may be true at some level, but isn’t particularly useful. When a situation gets messy, most of us look for reasons to explain why things aren’t clear. Most of us are accustomed to a kind of blame or attribution of fault. Without releasing an essential need for accountability, what if we were to acknowledge that complexity rarely requires blame, but rather, always requires adaptation. We laugh when the predicted sunny day turns to showers. Though we may be frustrated that the picnic doesn’t go as planned, there aren’t too many of us that hold weather forecasters to a certainty of prediction. We bring an umbrella, or put it away, and move on. Moving on feels like a core competency. Letting go of blame is a spiritual practice. Complexity is just complexity.

I’ve started a new project recently with some creative and visionary people from Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. University leadership. University faculty from Arts Education and Generalist Education. Pre-service teachers. In-service teachers. Principals from an elementary school and a middle school. Community organizations. The central premise is that authentic arts experiences make better humans. That’s my interpretation.

Recently we gathered, about twenty of us, for 1.5 days as a kind of core team — people committed to the early purposing and grounding of what can be a multi-year effort to change lives through arts integration. Lives of students in the neighboring schools. Lives of all of the groups named above.

Sarah Cook (Assistant Dean, Dahl School of Business) and Sami Weaver, two of our participants, created this graphic illustration of some of our content and process. Our first day together included attention on a starting context, hearing all participant voices on interest and importance, a framework on arts integration from Stuart Stotts, Kennedy Center Arts Integration Specialist, a framework for seeing how systems change, small table conversations on essential inclusions for our project, principles and agreements for the good of our project and the people it will serve, and witnessing our appreciations of this time together. Our second day together included attention on hearing all participant voices on their emerging energy for this work, clarifying our core narrative, exploring insights and inspirations from other national programs, stakeholder groups exploring essential beginnings, and some naming of next steps, which includes an expanded retreat in June.

There are several important resources that that this team has been adding too, that provide background information and recommendations. These resources name some of the scale that we in La Crosse are potentially involved in.

• From the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities (PCAH, started in 1982 by US President Ronald Regan), the initiative supported by President Barack Obama, Turnaround: Arts Initiative to Help Improve Low-Performing Schools.

From PCAH, this publication, Reinvesting in Arts Education. The “better humans” part of this report includes these points on students who participate in the arts (compiled by Barb Gayle, Viterbo’s VP for Academic Affairs and Dean of Graduate Studies):
– are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement
– have higher GPA / SAT scores
– demonstrate a 56% improvement in spatial-temporal IQ scores
– show higher levels of math proficiency by grade 12
– are more engaged and cooperative with teachers and peers
– are more self-confident
– are better able to express their ideas

These are all provoking patterns, aren’t they. Particularly to me, as it seems that on federal and state levels, in times of crisis, complexity, and financial shortfall, budgets for the arts are among the first to go. With desire for essential innovation, we slash what creates the very conditions needed. Further in the report it is noted that high-poverty students are being disproportionately short-changed  on arts education opportunities in their schools.

• Every Child is an Artist from the Public Policy Forum. This 2014 report explores arts education programs in Milwaukee and other US cities.
• First Lady: Arts Education Good for Good Schools. This newspaper article from May 20, 2014 describes some of the priorities that Michelle Obama is championing in support of arts integration.
• In Search of the Next Steve Jobs: Increasing Innovation by Connecting STEM and Art. From the Center of Science, Policy, and Society Programs, particularly from the perspective of needing innovation in science, this article further advocates the role of art experiences in education and society.

We have started to catch some of this on a website, with values of transparency and openness.

Creative. Visionary. Arts Integration. All of these touch me deeply. And, I believe, change lives.

More to come.