The Power of Story

I love my job today.

I believe sharing authentic stories is the secret to connection. Every semester, I assign the This I Believe essay as a way to help students practice creative nonfiction writing. Every semester, we read these aloud in class together. Every semester, I have the honour of encountering again the strength of the human spirit, the kindness that so many of us strive toward, and also the weight of suffering so many are asked to endure. And it's not just me, I look around the room at the close of class and see people smiling at each other, really smiling, some suspiciously shiny eyes, and people saying, "Wow, I had no idea...". One student today said, "I LOVE how I'm feeling right now, just full of love for humanity." I couldn't say it better.

We read our essays in class today. In one class alone, I have students from Bangladesh, the Philippines, Colombia, Bolivia, and Nigeria, not to mention from around the United States. They wrote about believing in choosing courage over comfort or how raising a difficult dog taught the nature of real patience or the belief that we ought to spend time with the people we love before too late. 

One of my favourite essays this year (though I love them all!)  focused on how, in Tagalog, the words for "love" and "expensive" are the same. He wrote about first love and learning that, when we say, "I love you," what we are really saying is, "Loving you requires sacrifices of time and effort and, most of all, ego. You are worth every bit of that effort."

Another student wrote about the day her mother was sent to prison. She was bewildered, 12, and being grilled in the courtroom. When the lawyer asked her who had brought her to the scene in question, she took a moment and replied, "The car." She got laughs and learned that humour could carry her through the most challenging moments in life.

Another wrote about coming to the United States alone and struggling to fit in with the weight of isolation almost unbearable, at first. As she read about calling her mother to ask about how to shop for groceries, she broke down in tears. I saw the face of another student who has shared his nativist beliefs with the class on a prior occasion visibly soften in response. He understood her explanation of the courage she had had to exercise.

The last essay of the day was read by a young woman I can only describe as a waif: fragile, pink-haired, and with a discernible wounding behind her eyes. In a timid voice, she began sharing how her caregivers taught her from a young age that she could not make good decisions--that she was not smart enough for college, not strong enough for the air force, and should focus on learning how to be a good wife. So she did. She married her first boyfriend and endured years of abuse, turning to alcoholism as a refuge. When she got to the part of the story when she made the decision to leave the abuse, her body language changed--her voice got stronger and more emphatic. She explained that she decided to start college and believes everyone  ought to have the freedom to choose their own path. The room almost broke out in cheers as she finished.

Emily Esfahani Smith, in her book The Power of Meaning, argues that one central pillar of meaning in our lives is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. I agree, but I also think there's a communal aspect to our life stories that she perhaps misses. When our stories move out of our heads and hearts into a shared space, we forge powerful bonds of belonging to each other, another pillar of meaning. Ask students for their stories and share your own! I teach writing, yes, but the accompanying exploration of what it means to be human is at least as important.

Humanities Education

 

Skidaway Island, GA, 2020

I'm resurrecting this blog to help me continue to reimagine learning!

To paraphrase Rumi, out beyond ideas of left-doing and right-doing, there is a community college classroom. I will meet you there. Most of my students work at least thirty hours a week. Some are veterans. Some are recent immigrants. Coming to class often requires courage and sacrifice. On this less ideologically charged ground, students of all colors, creeds, and many nations meet as they encounter the Humanities (mostly) from a place of working for a fresh start.

We’re talking about the power of networks this week in my Introduction to Humanities classes, specifically how the Humanities explore tension between individuals and the various systems we inhabit. Class began with the Katie Melua song, “Spider’s Web,” which asks, “If a black man is racist, is it okay, if it’s a white man’s racism that made him that way?” This song always leads to a discussion of the degree to which we are accountable for our own attitudes and actions. I expand the question to include other common networks like family or gender (If a woman mistreats men, is it okay, if it’s a man’s sexual violence that made her that way? Or, if an adult has frequent angry outbursts, is it okay, if it’s domestic violence that made them that way?) Of course, there are assumptions in the question, and bright students immediately begin naming them or parsing the word “okay”. The point of beginning with the song is to spark discussion and to get at how the Humanities endlessly explore these sorts of questions. The point also is that the song begins class with a question, not a position. 

This week’s discussions fed my soul in the way they exposed students to each other’s experience: there was the young Black woman who insisted that, while not okay, reverse racism is understandable, given the way that the Black community’s collective voice is still being attacked, for example, through recent redistricting efforts. Or the Indonesian student who shared the national motto in his home country: “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” or “Together in our differences,” an effort to move beyond ethnic, language, and religious divisions. Within the (to me!) sacred space of the classroom, it was also possible for the white military veteran now in his forties to share how, as an electrician in recent years, he needed an armed guard to enter certain neighbourhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee and still received race-related threats. Or the white gay student to share how traumatic it can be to be on the receiving end of someone else’s race-related trauma when you already are trying desperately to carry your own troubles. Sure, there was tension in the room and students realised that they saw the problem differently, but we were able to talk about trying to cultivate a posture of understanding, where we work to understand each other. Students also established common ground around needing to own our actions even if it can be harder to control our attitudes. We had a beautiful, rich, honest conversation about the very topics that I read every day are tearing the nation apart. I need Americans to know that it’s possible and happening in some Humanities classrooms!

Our discussion laid the groundwork for examining three related pieces: First, a short talk by the Dalai Lama on interdependence—how, even if we are selfish, it makes sense to care about helping to solve other people’s problems, as it will make our own life more peaceful. Second, John Donne’s brilliant Meditation XVII, on how none of us are islands, how “…any man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of all mankind.” I’ve found that reading these older pieces aloud makes them come alive for students. And, finally, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem, “Solitude”. This last helps students think about what part of themselves remains unseen and ultimately unknowable even to those closest to them. They leave class hopefully more aware that others have tried to understand how to be both an individual and a member of communities and networks, that there is wisdom to be found. In this Florida-wide General Education course, beyond the analysis and synthesis skills we cultivate, I work to plant seeds of curiosity about and confidence in working with the Humanities as a set of disciplines. 

In my little corner of the non-elite academic universe, Humanities education is alive and, I believe, critical to our American future. We must commit ourselves to equipping young people in this way to navigate a complex society facing complex problems. Their homework involved reflecting on the southern African (Zulu) philosophy of Ubuntu. I’m confident that students will come back next week with a great deal to say!

Does this approach work? Here are just a few comments last semester’s students made as they finished the course, in response to the question, “How will you use what you’ve learned in this course to shape a good life for yourself?”

Ultimately, shaping a good life means integrating everything I have learned from philosophy, psychology, literature, art, and my own lived experience into a life of purpose. Aristotle gives me direction, Frankl gives me meaning, wabi-sabi gives me acceptance, Housman gives me urgency, and jazz gives me flexibility. Together, they help me understand that a good life is not something I find; it is something I build.

I have borrowed light from everyone in this class; Frankl, Varty, Musashi, Chief Seattle, Heschel, Achebe; and what you are supposed to do with borrowed light is pass it along in a form more useful than you found it. I think I am on the right road. But I am still checking.

Taken together, the good life to which I’m striving is one that’s well-rounded. It includes

fulfilling work that has practical application and is grounded in Aristotelian notions of virtue. It

includes living lightly on the earth and using the ethical framework that Leopold developed in

his land ethic. It includes scheduling time for creativity using skills and ideas gleaned from the

arts and Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow. It includes cultivating deep, authentic connections

using principles from both Seligman and hooks. It includes maintaining a strong sense of

meaning and purpose using tenets from both Frankl and Camus. The humanities: philosophy,

literature, psychology, and the visual arts haven’t given me the answers to happiness. What they have provided, instead, is better questions, more refined language, and some great company as I think.

I can never predict exactly in which ideas or works of art or music a student might find inspiration and meaning. I am humbled every semester by students who uncover new layers of meaning in a poem I’ve read hundreds of times or new connections across time or different regions of the world. There’s an exquisite humanity in holding this shared experience of discovery for each new group of students. We can’t afford to get so caught up in ideological turf wars over Humanities education that we fail the actual, post-Covid, anxiety-filled, exhausted humans who desperately need what the Humanities from all times and places offer: wisdom, knowledge, comfort, provocation, and an understanding of how we got here. Along with how we might move forward.

Language & Identity Forum for Educators (LIFE)

"Global Citizenship," or what the International Baccalaureate Organization terms "International Mindedness," is a fuzzy concept. Every educator wants it but few are able to define it. More importantly, few can describe how exactly to cultivate it in a school. There's a reason for this. The concept, intriguingly, has been ignored by academia, with the result that literally no operational definition exists. Fascinating, right? Particularly now, as we witness such political polarization around the world. The desire to move towards a shared understanding of international mindedness, along with determination to conquer the IB's bewilderingly complex framework for language acquisition (while helping our students retain a coherent sense of identity!) are what prompted the convening of our first Language and Identity Forum for Educators (LIFE).

We were determined to run this conference differently than many of our own conference experiences, which have involved making fleeting, often superficial connections with other educators during long presentations of dubious worth. We wanted meaningful connections and practical, valuable outcomes for all attendees.

LIFE was a joint effort of Woodstock's Language Department and the Centre for Imagination. We carefully selected ten, like-minded IB schools around India to invite, including the American School of Bombay, UWC Mahindra in Pune, Deutsche Schule Bombay, American International School of Chennai, Heritage Xpeditionary School, Mercedes-Benz International, Pathways, Kodaikanal International School, The Doon School, and Oberoi International. Joining us to share his research and inspire us was Dr. Douglas Kennedy, whose areas of expertise include cultural intelligence and the introduction of mindfulness practice in schools. In preparation for the Forum, we all took the revealing, multi-rater CQ assessment out of the Cultural Intelligence Center in Singapore and Doug spent some time leading us through the results.

Doug has considerable experience helping schools and teachers understand what high and low CQ look like in daily life, and what sort of steps they might take to increase their CQ. The most common finding is that educators (and perhaps all of us) overestimate our cultural awareness and intelligence. We may be surprised to learn that our students and coworkers regularly observe and identify even micro-moments of cultural ignorance and sometimes offense. If we begin to recognize the difficulties, how might we train ourselves to move more fluidly across cultural boundaries in ways that honor the diversity we encounter?

As a host, I learned again the profound value of simply creating the right spaces for real, human connection, and therefore growth, to take place. From the beginning dinner reception outdoors in our beautiful, Himalayan surroundings to the closing dinner high at the top of the mountain, looking out over the valley, we interspersed the presentation of hard-core academic research with informal opportunities to socialize and share ideas and resources. By the time we got to an afternoon open space session dedicated to looking forward, we had a flood of ideas for specific ways to grow a lively network of language teachers and school leaders dedicated to working out the concept of International Mindedness.  Here are some top outcomes:

1. We will establish a professional learning community for school leaders and educators around the question of how to navigate diversity and increase CQ, led by Deutsche Schule Bombay. Part of this includes establishing a book-of-the-month club. April's book is Erin Meyer's The Culture Map.
2. We will set up a network of shared online teachers across the country so that students can keep learning home languages, even when their language is underrepresented in a school.
3. We will collaborate to create a curriculum for Hindi ab initio in the IB (a strange gap in the IB's thinking means that students are not yet able to study beginners' Hindi), led by UWC Pune.
4. We will create a handbook for school leaders on how to cultivate International Mindedness, a handbook that includes an operational definition and a rubric for measuring whether progress is happening, a collaborative effort led by Woodstock's Centre for Imagination. 

The Stomach

"When God first made man, man just laid around like a pillow. He wouldn't do anything! God regretted the decision to make such a useless creature. So he decided to give man a stomach. In this way, man would experience hunger. The hunger would motivate man to act. Since the time God gave man his stomach, the stomach has never been satisfied. And so we have greed."

A student shared the above story with me a few days ago, first shared with her by her grandmother.  She came to the CFI for help with structuring a paper in response to this question: Why is it so hard for humans to check their greed, even when they know the impact it is having on each other and on the environment? Why can we not change direction?

Schwartz's Circumplex of Values

We ended up in a fascinating conversation about Tim Kasser's work on Schwartz's theory of a circumplex of values. Kasser's research on materialism shows how misguided we are when we try to, for example, get people to start recycling or buy less by appealing to "Self-enhancement" values that have to do with power, achievement, or hedonism. See, for example, H&M's efforts to motivate people to recycle H&M clothing in exchange for a $5 voucher or 15% off their next purchase. The method works, temporarily, BUT every appeal to self-enhancement values ends up simply reinforcing those values, at measurable cost to the self-transcendence values on the opposite side of the circumplex. Instead, when we try to nudge behavior by emphasizing our interdependence, we reinforce values of universalism and benevolence, causing a measurable decrease in the value for self-enhancement. The basic premise of Kasser's and Schwartz's work is that we all possess all these values in some portion, and we can be consciously or subconsciously steered towards a greater emphasis, tilting the circle in one direction or another. 

I'm eager for educators to figure out how we might cultivate a deep understanding of interdependence from as young an age as possible, so that we actively grow young people's sense of responsibility and connection to others. Incidentally, this may also lead to a deeper sense of belonging for our students, possibly mitigating the widening crisis of anxiety and depression teenagers currently face.

Love and Learning

Monkey cuddling with a cloth "mother surrogate" in Harry Harlow's 1960s experiments

A couple days ago, I listened to a 2006 This American Life episode dedicated to answering the question of whether or not love and attachment can be taught. It got me thinking about the nature of love and learning.

The episode opened with Harry Harlow’s well-known attachment experiments with baby rhesus macaques and wire vs. cloth “mothers”. At a time when psychologists and doctors consistently warned mothers of the dangers of offering their children too much affection, Harlow set out to prove that children need affection to thrive. Over and over, he showed that baby rhesus macaques preferred a soft, cloth “mother” with no milk to a wire mother with milk. Not only that, but he demonstrated that these babies would continue to desperately seek affection from a cloth mother which had been designed to literally hurl the babies away each time they sought to bond or cuddle. Leaving the ethics of the experiment aside for a moment, the babies were so eager for attachment that they would reject their baby friends in favor of the mothers who rejected them.

From this introduction, the episode moved into interviews conducted with Rick and Heidi Solomon, a couple who had adopted a son from a Romanian orphanage. Adopted at the age of seven and a half, their new son had never been outside a crib. Daniel, the son, recounted how he had no real memories from his early years, how he didn’t remember thinking any real thoughts. He did recall a window and recalled wondering why he should be inside when the world outside the window seemed so lively and lovely.

Daniel’s first birthday with his new family triggered a crisis. He assumed that his new parents were his biological parents who had left him without love or birthdays for years. He grew angry. The anger was so intense that a series of psychologists and psychiatrists could offer no real solutions. Eventually, Heidi's persistence and relentless love for Daniel led the family to try a form of attachment therapy that involved recreating the conditions that infants experience while attaching to their parents. At the age of 13, Daniel was cuddled on his parents' joint laps and fed ice cream with a spoon while they gazed into each other's eyes. Bizarrely and miraculously, it sparked a change. Daniel calmed, developed attachment and slowly began to love his parents. He began to trust that they intended good for him.

But Heidi did not begin to suggest that this was some technique to be widely applied. What struck me was how Heidi responded to the interviewer's questions: "Do you feel like you can teach love?"

"No. I don't think the goal was ever love. The goal was attachment."

"Do you feel like you can teach attachment?"

"I mean, I think you can work really hard to create an environment where you can form an attachment."

Teachers face the same, soul-wrenching test as parents do. The poet Goethe said that, "we really only learn from those we love". This love and attachment, so necessary for deep learning, cannot be mandated or generated through a set of mechanical techniques.  As educators, we are limited to working really hard to create a particular environment, a set of ripe conditions, in which love and learning and wild growth can take place. Like Heidi's, our commitment must be relentless.

This is not some warm and fuzzy notion of learning. Researchers are increasingly finding that social and emotional learning necessarily take precedence. Without an environment characterized by healthy attachments and a sense of security, a young person struggles with academic learning.

It's more than a little ironic that, even as we "discover" the importance of profound attachments to other human beings in relation to learning, we find the prevalence of online learning and technology-driven education growing exponentially. It's not a perfect analogy, to be sure, but there are reasonable parallels between the screen as the wire mother surrogate, feeding the milk of information, and the preferred cloth surrogate, offering at least an illusion of warmth and life. Of course, a real live rhesus mother offers both warmth and food, as do real live, committed educators. 

https://baristanet.com/2018/03/our-kids-our-screens-what-can-we-do-find-out-at-montclair-cooperative-school-lifelong-learner-series-3-20/

I'm interested in how to create the conditions for secure, appropriate, and healthy attachments between teachers and students, so that rich learning can take place (recognizing the boundaries of a teaching/learning environment, as opposed to a parenting environment). What kind of bond does a student need with a teacher? And, in a classroom of twenty students with a range of needs, what might it look like to differentiate our approach to forming these attachments? I suspect that primary teachers might have a lot to teach the rest of us...

Coffee Wise

We started a weekly series this term, by and for staff, through which they can share areas of research, expertise or interest with the rest of us. Within two days of announcing the series, we had filled every slot till the end of term and four weeks into the next school year! People had clearly been waiting for the opportunity to share what excites them. As school leaders, sometimes it's easy to forget the depth of knowledge and expertise of a staff body.

In the four weeks since we started, we've heard about how Hindi cinema has shaped the Indian city and bourgeois tastes, about the network of international college counselors working diligently to widen access to higher education, about researching the expatriate community in Goa, and, today, about studying light as a physicist and understanding the depth of spiritual metaphor present in its nature.

Ten to fifteen teachers are choosing to spend an hour at the end of their school day, engaging intellectually with each other's work and passions. I can see it breeding new appreciation for unique areas of expertise. It is already proving a great way to kickstart professional learning communities again and to ascertain which members of the community may have the bandwidth and energy to help lead.

Each week, I leave feeling privileged to work with dedicated learners and gratified at having the opportunity to spend an hour completely shifting gears to consider a new question or issue. I'm reminded how much we all need to be seen and heard for our individual, deep selves. And how much I love to listen and learn!

Space to think

The Centre for Imagination enjoys a fabulous view and I make the most of it. Whenever we have a bit of sunshine, I set up on the wrap-around verandah. Invariably, a student (or several) will come sit near me. I have learned that sometimes they need silence and sometimes a conversation. In a residential school, with family far away, both can be in short supply.

Today, I was joined by a Grade 10 student from Afghanistan. Spring has not quite sprung yet here in Mussoorie, so he had his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee as he sat down and looked out over the hills. I waited, trying to sense his needs. After letting the silence settle, I looked up from my laptop and asked how things were going. He explained that he had come over to the Centre for space to think.

We have a break coming up at the end of this week and many of his friends are headed home. It's made him think about boys his age at home. The word he uses to describe them is "blind". He says so many in Kabul feel hopeless, like there's no point in educating themselves or trying to find work, because they may die. Drug use has spread, as an escape from harsh reality. He described arguments in his family about whether there was purpose in planning for the future.

I asked if he felt different, having come to a place outside that environment. He said the biggest change in himself is feeling like he has perspective, like he can really see. He is scared of what will come of the current peace talks with the Taliban. He wanted space to think through his own future, knowing that he wants to go back to Afghanistan and looking for his place. Answers will not come quickly, and I suspect he'll keep returning to think further and more deeply.

Days like this make me grateful students have a space to think surrounded by nature and wildness, and that, as educators, we are invited into the literal shaping of the future, as young people set their aspirations and imagine who they might become.