Tag: relationships

Nature’s Design Principles: Relationships

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world . . .

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

–Rumi

 

In the beginning, everything was connected.

Along the way, some of us changed our minds.

And now, in the shadow of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, our survival depends on our ability to rediscover the wisdom we have lost.

In the end, it turns out, everything is connected, and at every scale — from the cosmologic to the subatomic.

“Exalted we are,” writes the American biologist E.O. Wilson, “risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of Earth’s fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history.”

“There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” says novelist Richard Powers. “The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. Forests mend and shape themselves into subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within.”

This sort of deep relational weaving is central to indigenous cultures the world over. As American activist Winona LaDuke points out, “teachings, ancient as the people who have lived on a land for five millennia, speak of a set of relationships to all that is around, predicated on respect, recognition of the interdependency of all beings, an understanding of humans’ absolute need to be reverent and to manage our behavior, and an understanding that this relationship must be affirmed through lifeways and through acknowledgment of the sacred.”

Several hundred years ago, however, a new story began to emerge in Europe — one that was fueled by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and that would come to shape the later thinking of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. It was a story that displaced us from the universal center, and urged us to no longer view nature as something to which we were bound, but something to be, in Bacon’s words, “hounded in her wanderings, and bound into service, and made a slave.”

When, in the 17th century, Decartes proclaimed Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I exist”), and Newton developed a mathematical formulation that could provide a consistent mathematical theory of the world (i.e., classical physics), the narrative shift that had begun centuries earlier had finally been completed — away from the notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe, and toward a mechanistic, linear world of separable parts. 

It’s the story that has dominated Western culture ever since.

Recently, however, its foundations have begun to crumble. New discoveries in the fields of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have necessitated profound changes in concepts of everything from space to time to cause and effect. As Einstein put it: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundations of physics to this [new type of knowledge have] failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”

In fact, the natural relationship between parts and wholes confirms what some have been saying all along — that the universe is not a clock; it’s a cloud. “As individuals and societies,” explains Austrian scientist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities.” 

In fact, we are not just embedded in nature, but also to one another. “When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz, “you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist. We have traditionally assumed that intelligence resides in our brains, in the individual animal. But we have found the first evidence that intelligence can also be encoded in the hidden network of communication between us.”

This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature — a lesson that is equally true at the smallest scale.

“In the quantum world,” explains Margaret Wheatley, “relationship is the key determiner of everything.” Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent entities. These unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation.

“In this world, the basic building blocks of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all bundles of potential. Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.”

This is why the path towards creating a living school requires cultivating the individual and collective self-awareness that comes from understanding identity — who (& why) we are; applying information — what (& why) we notice; and strengthening relationships — how (& why) we connect. “Although each of these three domains has its own dynamism and motion,” explains educator Stephanie Pace-Marshall, “it is their confluence and synergy that create the generative landscape essential for individual and system wholeness, meaning, and connections. Relationships represent the dynamic, self-generating learning network of our systems, and they establish its capacity for collaborative inquiry.”

But what does that really mean in the work we do with one another in our communities, our organizations, and our schools? 

How can we attend more intentionally, and see more clearly, the webwork of ways in which we are all interwoven?

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, a higher level of relational attunement is not just what allows us to build healthier cultures; it’s what allows us to comprehend the full weight of our spiritual role in the cosmos — to be, as Wilson put it, the mind of the biosphere itself.

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’” said Einstein, “a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion  to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty.”

This is, in part, the gift of the art of Liz Lerman, who helps us see what a truly trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-media approach to storytelling can reveal about who we are and how we connect.

It’s what we learn from the science of honeybees, whose deeply democratic, highly-effective form of life-or-death group decision-making helps demonstrate what a high-functioning collective intelligence can actually engender.

It’s what the work of UCLA psychology professor Dan Siegel makes visible, by providing us with a scientific definition of that most elusive of all human features — the mind — and helping us understand precisely what connects us both internally and externally.

And it’s what we can see and feel throughout the halls of Crosstown High, a public high school in Memphis, Tennessee that has crafted a student body, and a school campus, that are meant to tap the collective wisdom and shared culture of an entire city. 

“Mutuality is the principle of the individual body as well as the law governing the interplay of all bodies. It is the key to understanding reality,” explains biologist Andreas Weber. “To understand ourselves, we have to recognize ourselves in other living creatures. To be mirrored is a central element in the formation of human identity.”

Virginia Woolf put it another way. “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern. The whole world is a work of art . . . Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God.

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

The Art of Liz Lerman

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine, for a moment, a long, upright line that runs from top to bottom. 

At the top is art so separate from its culture that its greatness is measured by its uselessness.

At the bottom is art so quotidian that no one even thinks to call it art.

This, Liz Lerman explains, is the hierarchy of ideas under which almost all of us labor. 

And it is a false divide.

“Now imagine turning that line sideways to lay it horizontal,” she offers. “That way each of these poles exerts an equal pull and has an equal weight. If we are lucky enough, we can actually take the long highway between the sometimes opposing forces, discovering impulses that can feed our artistic impulses along the way.”

This is what it means to, as Lerman, says, “hike the horizontal.” And this is the journey she has been curating for all of us for the past five decades  — a journey that is designed to blur the lines between artist and citizen, artist and scientist, and artist and audience. 

Lerman’s career began as a young girl in constant motion — “up giant slides before my parents could stop me, racing into the flooded backyard to jump through the water, and begging for dance classes which I was finally allowed to begin when my family left California for Washington, DC, in the early 1950s.”

It continued through her teenage years, dancing in a ballet performance for President Kennedy, appearing in Life Magazine, and witnessing the tension between making art and living in a world that was alight with the civic friction of the civil rights movement. 

“What I realized,” she says, “is that dance is a birthright, and birthrights are easily stolen. It is the human connection to the body, and the body’s connection to the mind, that provides a ladder, a safety net, or a trampoline, enabling people to experience the spiritual. People use their bodies to learn their history. And so to make change at all, you first have to notice what is going on around you or inside you.”

This epiphany led Lerman to found The Dance Exchange in 1976, and to organize its work around four essential questions:

Who gets to dance? What is the dance about? Where is it happening? And why does it matter?

In partnership with her colleagues, Lerman choreographed and performed dances that were deeply grounded in both community issues and the communities themselves. The Dance Exchange performed in concert halls, but also community centers, children’s hospitals, and retirement homes.

“I wanted to document ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live and work in,” she explained, “and the encounters that we have with each other. I hunted for ways to maintain my commitment to the excellence of the concert world in a balance with the dynamic, meaningful, and equally challenging world of communities.”

Early in her career, this sentiment led her to make what was at the time a radical choice — a dance of performers both young and old. “I began to question accepted notions of who and what was beautiful,” she recalled. “It was then that I began to see that from an artistic point of view, we could change people’s lives, and from a community point of view, we could change how people interacted.

“The older people made it so easy to extend oneself, converse with strangers, and be big about it all. Older bodies make for great storytelling, beautiful movement, and a curious form of courage.”

What surprised Lerman the most, however, was the impact of the relationship between her oldest and youngest dancers. “I decided that they were dancing so well because they were so loved. The dance environment in which most of these students had grown up was harshly judgmental. It was a liberating experience that offered such unreserved appreciation for their dancing and admiration for their bodies.”

This formula is one Lerman has revisited throughout her career, one that eventually led her into a creative alliance with scientists, and multimedia performances about subjects ranging from atomic energy to the trauma of war to the double helix. “It’s by now well established that science and art have a lot in common,” she says, “as well as much to teach each other. Artists and scientists have a keen understanding that not knowing is fuel for the imagination rather than fuel for humiliation. There is nothing to hide.

“I think we are at our most successful when we make it possible for people to undergo a fresh understanding of their surroundings, of an idea, or of their own relationship to artistic experience. We look at a body and we see the person, the shape, the line, the personality. If we know the person or we know how to look deeper, we see their history as well. The same happens to us in a building or a park or our homes. We see the place, the shape, the line, the personality. If we look deeper, we can perceive their history too. When we allow ourselves to witness and respond to both things at once, we can learn much about ourselves, about the spaces and places around us.

“The opening and closing curtains bracket a moment in time; they are a pair of parentheses within the long, ongoing project of making sense of the world. The theater calls our attention, brings us together, makes us focus, asks us questions, makes us wonder, and then releases us out again into the chaos.

We each belong to many domains, and although we may live in one, we have a history, need, and empathy for others. We are dwellers in the transdomain.”

 

To Measure Success in America’s Schools, Count the Flamingos

Posted on | by Sam

As an educator, I can’t think of a more important, elusive, and agonizing question than this doozy: How do you measure success?

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered a new source of inspiration for how we should answer it, by way of a 27,000-acre fish farm at the tip of the Guadalquivir river in Southern Spain.

The farm, Veta La Palma, is led by a biologist named Miguel Medialdea. I learned about Miguel’s work from a 2010 TED Talk by renowned chef Dan Barber, who first became aware of Miguel after discovering just how unsustainable “sustainable fish farming” practices really were.

To produce just one pound of farm-raised tuna, for example, requires fifteen pounds of wild fish to feed it. Nothing sustainable about that. In response, industry leaders have dramatically reduced their “feed conversion ratio” by feeding their fish, well, chicken – or, more specifically, chicken feathers, skin, bone meal and scraps, dried and processed into feed.

“What’s sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?” Barber asks his audience, to peals of laughter. Yet there’s nothing funny about the ways we have decimated the large fish populations of the world. And there’s nothing funny about an agribusiness model that, in an effort to find ways to feed more people more cheaply, has in fact been more about the business of liquidation than the business of sustainability.

Enter Veta La Palma, formerly a cattle farm, and now a sprawling series of flooded canals, flourishing wildlife, and fecund marshland. In fact, because it’s such a rich system, Veta La Palma’s fish eat what they’d be eating in the wild. “The system is so healthy,” Barber explains, “it’s totally self-renewing. There is no feed.

“Ever heard of a farm that doesn’t feed its animals?”

Eventually, Barber asked his host the $64,000 question: how they measure success. Medialdea pointed to the pink bellies of a thriving population of flamingos.

“But Miguel,” Barber asked, “isn’t a thriving bird population like the last thing you would want on a fish farm?”

“No,” he answered. “We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. The pinker the belly, the better the system.”

It was at this point I thought about how much of Miguel’s work had lessons for our own.

Like agribusiness, education has been shaped by the logic of a single question for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, just as feeding more people more efficiently has led us into a feedback loop in which we constantly erode our own global supply of fish, educating more children more efficiently has yielded a shell game of metrics that have allowed us to falsely claim success (or failure), when in fact all we have been doing is eroding a different, more precious supply: our ability to fall in love with ideas.

You know this, but it’s worth saying again: the ultimate measures of success in our schools cannot be reading and math scores, or better attendance, or higher graduation rates (though those are all good things). These are not our Pink Flamingos, because they are not indicative of a thriving ecology in our schools.

At Veta La Palma, the best way to measure the system’s overall quality is by gauging the health of its predators. What is the equivalent measure in our schools? If we started to view our schools less as solitary islands, and more as single links in a systemic chain of each child’s growth and development, how would we measure success then? What would we need to start, stop and keep doing?

For starters, I think we’d want to track every available measure of that child’s overall health: mental, nutritional, social, emotional, developmental – and yes, intellectual. We’d stop assuming that schools are capable of being assessed in a vacuum, and start making sense of their effectiveness amidst a larger network of institutions and services (think how much this would change the perception of private schools). And we’d keep looking at existing efforts to apply a more ecological approach to learning, from the Community Schools model, to instruments that help measure a child’s sense of hope, engagement and well-being, to individual schools that proactively measure – wait for it – curiosity and wonder, to, yes, the nearly 22,000 Montessori schools around the world.

These priorities would also lead to a different set of questions that could drive future innovations:

  • Who else, and where else, are our children receiving sources of nourishment for their growth and development? Are the connections between those resources and the school implicitly or explicitly drawn?
  • What are the components of each community’s ecosystem of youth development and support?
  • What are our young people bringing with them to school each day – figuratively and literally – and how is our work at school explicitly designed to help them find the proper balance between their different developmental needs?
  • How can we better measure the optimal reflections of normalized growth – i.e., self-awareness, self-control, self-direction, and self-satisfaction?
  • How much student learning are we expecting to occur in the school building? How else can we leverage the larger community to be an active partner in the overall learning process?
  • In what ways are we creating everyday conditions for wonder and curiosity?
  • How clearly have we articulated our school’s ultimate vision of success, and how clearly do our students and their families understand how what we do each day is in service of that larger goal?

To transform sustainable farming, Dan Barber proposed a new question: “How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

The same lessons of scale are true for sustainable schooling. As Miguel Medialdea puts it, “I’m not an expert in fish; I’m an expert in relationships.”

So are America’s educators. The central goal of schooling is not to instill knowledge, but to unleash human potential. The central model for schooling is not a factory; it’s an ecosystem. And the central measure of success is not a single benchmark, but a comprehensive ability to affirm the overall health of the systems that surround our children as they learn and grow.

So let’s get serious about applying two billion years’ worth of proof points in order to build, and measure, the ecological networks our kids actually need in order to learn and grow. It’s the only way to find the Pink Flamingos that have eluded us thus far.

It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

I’m spending my days observing the two-week summer session of the Inspired Teaching Institute, a yearlong professional development program from Center for Inspired Teaching, a remarkable organization that prepares and supports DC teachers. The institute, described as “a 100% physical, intellectual, and emotional process through which teachers explore the art of teaching in an energetic and safe environment,” is taking place each day in the wrestling room of a DC high school in a leafy green neighborhood of Washington, DC.

The room is large and open. There are no seats, and homemade signs and placards, most of which feature memorable ideas about teaching and learning, cover the walls:

“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”

”It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained; to be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world – and become one’s key to the experience of others.”

Although I’ll be producing several longer pieces about Inspired Teaching and their summer Institute, I want to briefly share an activity from yesterday that sparked an essential insight into the nature of teaching and learning – and what it is we adults must prioritize in our efforts to help all children learn.

Towards the end of the day, Inspired Teaching founder Aleta Margolis, a veteran educator and former actor with an aura of presence that stems from her previous time on stage, asked the participants to brainstorm the first things they thought of in response to the following prompt: “What are the questions kids ask when they’re in school?”

A torrent of predictable answers greeted her request:

What’s that? Why are we doing this? What are we supposed to do? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I get up now? How is this going to help me in real life? Can I go with you? How much do you get paid? Do you have a boyfriend? Can I go home with you? Where are we going? How much longer? Can I have this? Do you sleep here? Can I go to the nurse? What if? Can I have some water? Can you get him to stop? Why is that teacher so mean? Is it time to go? Can we go outside? Can we have extra recess? What’s my grade? Can I do extra credit? Why’d you call my house? When is that due? Can I sit by you? Are you allowed to do that? How old are you? Is she OK? Are you getting fired? Do you love me?

Then Aleta asked a different question – “What are the questions kids ask when they’re curious and wondering about the world around them?”

Can you show me? Did you see that? Can I try? Am I doing it right? Can I take it home? What does this do? How do I stop? Will I get hurt? Will you catch me? How fast can I go? Why isn’t it working? Why is it like this? Will you be watching me? Let me do it.

After both lists were generated, Aleta led the group through a process of labeling every question on both lists into one of three categories:  P – a procedural question; N – a question relating to a personal need; or C – a question reflecting innate curiosity.

Notably, the majority of the questions received either P’s or N’s, and there were few C’s in the bunch. The disconnect between what children ask in school and what they ask when they’re curious about the world was clear. “We’re going to spend the next week and a half and throughout the school year,” said Aleta, “getting students to generate more curiosity questions, and less questions that relate to purely procedural needs.”

As the participants nodded their heads enthusiastically at the thought of the new pedagogical skill they would soon acquire, I found myself noticing something else. The overwhelming majority of the questions, regardless of which category they were in, related to personal needs, and underscored the transformative power of interpersonal relationships between teachers and students.

Will you catch me? Did you see that? Can I sit by you? Do you love me?

Some among us may want to resist this fact and stay focused squarely on instructional strategies and the bottom line of school reform – improving student test scores. I’m reminded of the controversial Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” commercial from a few years back. But just as all athletes surely are role models (whether or not they choose to fulfill the responsibility), all teachers are role models, too, and adults with a disproportionate influence on the lives and priorities of their students.

This simple truth reminded me that although our students need us to provide engaging content, clear structures and probing questions, the overriding quality they need from us is nurturance, support, and a place where they can be seen and heard. It’s about relationships – first and foremost. And strengthening the quality and quantity of relationships between adults and children in a school building should always be our primary improvement strategy.