For Jeff Duncan-Andrade, a lifelong educator, school founder, and professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance at San Francisco State University, the answer depends on which sort of society you envision.
But if you take the last 200+ years of American history as our collective answer to that question, the one we have envisioned is, simply put, the one we now have — a social (dis)order marked by radical inequality, mass incarceration, and entrenched social apartheid at every turn.
For Andrade, a proper education is one that “teaches kids they can transform things. They not only learn to think for themselves, they learn they can define new limits for themselves.” That sort of education, however, is rarely the one that is available to students of color.
By contrast, in those schools, the emphasis is on “order, control, compliance and accepting your station in life. What’s pounded into these kids is that to do well in school you don’t challenge, you don’t question, you don’t get too excited and demonstrate your passion for learning by jumping out of your seat. If you’re a good student, you contain yourself.”
How, then, can we transform the systems that hold us prisoner?
And what can each of us do to support a system of public schools that are equitable, vibrant, and alive?
Join us for a special Spark Series event with Jeff Duncan-Andrade this week — Wednesday, January 26th, at 3pm EST (note the earlier start time) — and if you want a sneak preview (and a better understanding of the distinction between equality and equity, and why it matters so much), see below.
This is the question of American history — and we are, to put it mildly, horrible at answering it.
As The Guardian put it last week, “the problem isn’t that American democracy is about to be overthrown; it’s that America isn’t much of a democracy to begin with.“
For that reason, tonight’s Spark Series event with Jenny Finn is a MUST.
In 2014, in the hills of rural Appalachia, Jenny founded Springhouse School, an intergenerational learning community “with life at its center.”
As she puts it, “we are actively reimagining education and believe learning is a lifelong journey that should be centered around vitality, meaning, and cultivating wholeness to better serve the world’s emerging needs.”
Put another way: Springhouse is a community that understands what it means — and requires — to be free. ??
“If you feel unprepared from the inside out and are wondering what your gift is,” says Jenny, “we have a program that can help you get to know yourself more deeply.”
So join us tonight, January 12th, at 8pm ESTvia the usual link, so we can craft a better way forward, together.
In fact, this shift has been remaking the scientific community for years; scholars in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the metaphors they use to describe their work, and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”
Medical scholars like Dan Siegel agree. “Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story,” he explains, “molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become.”
That’s not just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed.
A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.”
In the daily whir of our personal and professional lives, that means we need one another more than ever – and not just the people who make up our proximite physical pods, but those of us who, thanks to these dialectical technologies, can now foster meaningful connections (and expand our respective self-creating patterns) across miles and time zones and traditions.
“When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior, “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. 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.”
To that end, then, let’s make 2022 the year when we provide one another with three things in abundance:
New Rituals
One of the most important features of rituals, psychologist Rebecca Lester explains, is that they not only mark time; they create time. “By defining beginnings and ends to developmental or social phases, rituals structure our social worlds and how we understand time, relationships, and change.”
This is why we created the Seed + Spark Network – as a space for new rituals in this highly liminal period of our lives. For all of us, life as “normal” is distinctly over. Yet we’ve yet to discover whatever our new normal will be. “So we wait,” Lester writes, “in this in-between state, betwixt and between, neither here nor there, suspended.”
We are not built to live this way – in endless liminality, with life and time unmarked.
So we need new rituals, and although each of us will have our own, I hope you’ll join us each Wednesday nightthroughout this new year -– when we can mark the time, make new connections, and evoke our own bundles of potential. See you there?
New Ideas
We won’t get out of the mess we’re in by applying the same logic that got us here in the first place.
We need a new path, and a new story.
Whereas for centuries we’ve all lived under the same systemic trappings of modern life (from capitalism to communism), today we require a new kind of order, and a new source of strength. “Anything not built for a network age — our politics, our economics, our national security, our education — is going to crack apart under its pressures,” journalist Joshua Cooper Ramo suggests. “Our era is one of connected crises. Relationships now matter as much as any single object. And puzzles such as the future of United States-China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence or terrorism are all network problems, unsolvable with traditional thinking.”
In response, we’ve designed a deck of cards for humanity that will, we hope, help you fall (back) in love with the natural world, become more knowledgeable about living systems, and apply those insights creatively to address the myriad problems that require our sustained, urgent attention.
Most importantly, we need one another – both those who are already a part of our circle, and those we have yet to meet.
In a living system, everything is connected. There are no parts to be exchanged or fixed. Critical connections, not critical mass, are what matters most.
How, then, can we deepen both the quantity and the quality of the connections in our lives?
“Exalted we are,” wrote the recently-departed 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.”
So let’s be more intentional in this New Year in the ways we weave ourselves together.
Let’s face the problems of the world with our collective strength and wisdom. And let’s make this a year of new rituals, new ideas, and new relationships that can help light the path to building a better world, by design.
“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern,” Virginia Woolf said. “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.”
I first met Kim Carter a lifetime ago, not long after she opened a public school in New Hampshire that remains, to this day, one of the most innovative and life-affirming I’ve ever witnessed.
In response, I wrote about Kim and her school in my 2009 book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community (you can read that chapter here) — and it’s true, Kim is a master of democratic processes, structures, and spirit. But since then, I’ve learned some of the myriad other deep wells of knowledge that this former librarian possesses — and TONIGHT, at 8pm EST, you’ll get to learn some of those things, too, when Kim joins us for what is sure to be a memorable Seed Talk.
How do we make learning more meaningful, and relevant, and real?
What does an environment of transformational learning actually look like — and require?
And what is the future actually waiting for us to do, today?
Join us tonight, via this link — and bring your questions, and your curiosity.
In what ways does its use connect you to the world that surrounds you — people, earth, & sky?
How might you inhabit it more intentionally?
Rulan Tangen has been exploring these questions for years, and in our next installment of the Spark Series — public conversations about the future of humanity, using nature as our guide — we all get to join her on that journey.
An internationally accomplished dance artist, choreographer, and director with over three decades of experience in multiple movement genres, Rulan is the Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer of DANCING EARTH, a company that creates contemporary dance and related arts through Indigenous and intra-cultural relationships centered in ecological and cultural diversity.
Her work explores movement as an evolving language of global Indigenous and inter-cultural relation building, rooted in inclusion of diverse cosmologies from her own experience and those of the artists with whom she co-creates.
And TONIGHT —Wednesday, November 10th, at 8:00pm EST(via this link) — Rulan will invite us to consider how the movement of our bodies can (re)connect us to the cosmic system of which we are all a part.
One year ago this week (!!!), 180 Studio launched Seed + Spark with a simple query — HUMANS WANTED — and no real sense of what to expect.
But then the humans started showing up, from places as far-flung as Scotland and Shanghai, and we realized it wasn’t just the chance to learn about living systems that made people Zoom in on a Sunday morning; it was also the chance to learn about one another, with attention and intention.
TONIGHT — Wednesday, November 3rd, at 8:00pm EST — we’ll gather again in that spirit for the first time this fall.
We call it Kairos: the ancient Greek notion of timeliness, the right moment, and the right mixture of conditions. And we’ll use that moment as we have before: to reconnect, to plan, and to learn — together, with attention and intention.
If that sounds like the blueberries on your cereal bowl, I look forward to seeing you there (via this link).
The 108 cards we’ve created are something you read (like Tarot) more than play (like Poker). That’s because the goal is not to compete, but to complete a design challenge that relates to a real-world problem, using the cards you select as your inspiration.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, join us TONIGHT — Wednesday, October 27th, at 8pm EST via the link at the top of https://elevate.explo.org/seedandspark/, and help us determine what works (and what doesn’t) in our overall design so far, so that together, we can #changethestory of how we learn and live.
Her first book, Origins, explained how our time in utero helps shape the rest of our ex utero lives — for better or for worse.
And her newest book, The Extended Mind, suggests, provocatively, that the way we’ve thought about how people learn has largely gotten it all wrong “We think best when we think with our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships,” she argues while weaving together research from a variety of fields. “The demands of the modern environment have now met, and exceeded, the limits of the biological brain.
The smart move, therefore, is not to lean even harder on the brain; it’s to think outsidethe brain. But how?
What does it mean to transcend the biological limits of that three-pound lump in our skulls? What would an intentionally-designed school (or workplace) look like if it took all this research to heart? And which aspects of our most familiar ways of thinking about learning, if any, should we keep?
If those questions are of interest to you — and/or if you have questions of your own, join us tonight, October 6th, at 8pm EST, when Annie stops by the Spark Series for a vibrant, free-wheeling conversation about the future of humanity — and how we can use nature as our guide.
Two years ago, I visited Indonesia to walk the inimitable bamboo hallways of the Green School, as part of a lifelong search for the best schools in the world.
Almost immediately after arriving, however, I met Tim Fijal — a transplanted Canadian and gentle spirit whose own journey of discovery had gradually taken him out of the classroom, and into the rice fields of Bali.
Since then, we produced a short film about Tim’s work with a mixture of Balinese adults and young people to use the natural world as an invitation back into the core of human identity (you can see it below) — and Tim has launched a new organization, The Astungkara Way, which provides a combination of courses and experiences to help people reconnect with nature.
And now, to make that dream a full-fledged reality, Tim needs your support.
I hope you’ll do so here. And please, help spread the word!
In Australia, the country of his birth, Thanh Bui learned early on that kids who looked like him faced two possible paths.
On one, traversed by the only other Asian student in his school, the cold sting of isolation and ridicule awaited. On the other, however, came the assimilatory embrace of knowing you were “one of the lads.”
For Bui, youthful, outgoing, and kinetic, it was an easy choice — one that would take him to heights his immigrant parents could never have imagined: first, playground popularity and acceptance, and then, eventually, global celebrity and superstardom.
The only requirement was that he suppress his Vietnamese identity.
It would take decades before Bui understood the true cost of his unconscious choice.
And it’s why he’ll spend the next decade planting seeds that he hopes can one day frame new paths, and new choices, for a new generation of Vietnamese children.
Recently, amid the symphony of barking dogs and the aromatic smell of diesel fuel, Bui sat on a fishing boat atop the muddy waters of the Mekong River, contemplating how his family’s journey had begun in this exact spot, a lifetime ago.
This was where his parents, along with eighty-five tightly-packed strangers, had summoned the courage to leave the country of their birth in search of a better life.
“They were the age then, 28, that I was when I first came back,” Bui said. “They had no education, no money, and nothing but the clothes on their backs. That’s why I wanted to come back here. I wanted to know exactly the place they had left.
“When you know where you’re from,” he said slowly, “there’s this sense of humanity that sweeps through you. I don’t think you’re ever O.K. until you know exactly where you’re from — and I’ve been on that journey my whole life.”
For anyone who is the child of immigrants, Thanh Bui’s journey will feel familiar. Although he grew up in Adelaide, a cosmopolitan city on Australia’s southern coast, Bui’s early experiences were limited to the dusty farm where his father picked potatoes. When the crop was wiped out one year, Bui’s parents packed what little they had to travel 700 kilometers further south, to the capital city, Melbourne.
Through a network of fellow immigrants, Bui’s parents found a job making jeans. To encourage her two sons, Thanh and Tan, to pitch in, their mother promised one penny for each pocket they sewed. As they worked, Bui recalls, “my brother and I heard every day that the only way to elevate oneself is through education. And although we were allowed to spend our earnings on jellybeans, every dollar my parents saved went into our education.”
At home, the Bui brothers led a life that was disciplined, directed, and thoroughly Vietnamese. Yet Thanh recalls “starting to feel this sense of not belonging anywhere, which left me wondering, ‘Who am I?’ But my father always said, ‘Son, I almost died three times getting out. The last thing you’re going to do is disrespect me and your ancestors by not knowing your language.’”
Eventually, Thanh earned a full scholarship to a prestigious boys school in Melbourne. His parents were thrilled, but Thanh remembers “feeling so out of place, like all eyes were on me. That started my whole understanding of how I fit in. I had to learn how to be an Australian.”
At the same time, Thanh was realizing that the dreams he held for himself did not align with the dreams his parents held for him. “Ever since I was little,” he explained, “I had the sense that music was part of me, that it could take me to this other world that I’d never visited before.”
His parents encouraged him to pursue his artistic side — as an extracurricular activity. But by the time he was 17, Bui’s talent had yielded some enviable choices, from pursuing a college degree on full scholarship, to becoming the lead singer of a band on the cusp of its inaugural Asian tour.
For Thanh’s parents, the choice was simpler: doctor or lawyer.
“You could see the pride in their faces,” Bui recalled. “They’d worked their whole lives for this, they’d sacrificed everything for this, this moment. This was the achievement.”
But Bui decided he had to follow his true path. “So I took a deep breath, I swallowed, and then I said the words that I knew would break my parents’ hearts:
“‘Mom and Dad, I want to be an artist.’”
Eight years would pass before he returned home again.
He traveled all over the world.
He started songwriting.
He nearly won Australian Idol.
And then, in 2010, at the height of his fame, he was invited to visit Vietnam on an open ticket — to meet with producers, record some tracks, and see what happens.
Three years later, he was still there — performing regularly as a solo artist, hosting the country’s most popular TV show, and beginning to feel accepted for the first time: a Vi?t Ki?u returning to his roots.
Yet his time in the country of his ancestors had made two things clear: the first was the complete absence of infrastructure to support Vietnamese artists. “Music at that time was an elite product few people had access to,” Thanh explained. “In a country of 95 million people, there are only a handful of people pursuing careers in music. And there’s talent here — but if talent doesn’t meet opportunity, then it’s nothing.”
The second epiphany was more personal. “I’d been shuttling between two homes for three years, trying to figure out what it meant to be Vietnamese and Australian in a world that was so globalized, and how to reconcile these different sides of myself. That’s when I realized that if I ever wanted to do so, I needed to move here for good. I needed to go all in.”
And so, on January 1, 2013 — Thanh Bui moved permanently to Vietnam to open the SOUL Music & Performing Arts Academy, a school that could stitch together both the modern and traditional sides of Vietnamese identity in order to “bring the soul back into our music.”
It was a rocky beginning.
At SOUL’s first open house, even though a thousand people came through the door, just fifteen registered for classes. “It was a stab in the heart,” Bui says. “Everyone was telling us it wouldn’t work. And in that moment the numbers reflected that. But it helped me understand the local context of the families we were trying to reach. We were still too Western-leaning. Parents wanted their kids to be singing in Vietnamese.”
So Bui and his partners tweaked the course offerings, and gradually their student roster grew. “Our formula was to bring the world’s best ideas about artistry and craft to Vietnam, and then localize it,” he explained. “What was missing in Vietnam was a different sort of advocacy for the arts — to make them a vital part of a child’s holistic development: to be global citizens with local values.
“Vulnerability, for example, is a Western concept; ‘saving face’ is a Vietnamese value. The modern identity requires elements of both. So we use the arts to give kids the courage to find their own sense of themselves. Ultimately that’s why we exist — to inspire the next generation to be unafraid, and to find and use their voice.”
One weekday afternoon, amidst the patchwork of old French colonial and modern buildings that make up the SOUL campus, fifteen-year-old Bao Tan provided a walking embodiment of her school’s founding purpose. With long black hair, steady eyes, and a smouldering intensity, Bao recalled passing the school everyday as an eight-year-old, and “wondering about it.” Then she started writing songs, “and saying all these things I hadn’t been able to say in the past,” and she registered for every class she could take, from traditional singing to hip-hop dance. “All these things had been inside of me for so long,” Bao explained. “I’ve discovered that music is a part of me. I can’t say that I’m an extrovert but I feel like I have lots of things to say but I don’t know how to express it. And sometimes I really feel lonely, but not really because music is besides me.”
As a swirl of students around her — from infants to teenagers — arrived for their afternoon classes, Bao reflected on her generation, and what music can provide. “A lot of teenagers nowaday, not all the time do we know what we really want. We don’t really know what we want to do and pursue — so it’s really hard for me personally. I feel like sometimes I’m just scared that if I speak, will people judge me? You’re supposed to listen to your parents. But what are the other ways I can learn to explore myself? By speaking for yourself now, you really know what your identity is. When you look at me, what do you think I am — and is it the way that I think I am?
“A lot of parents in Vietnam, they raise their kids to just be a businessman or a lawyer. But there are lots of kids out there just like me. They want us to live in the safety zone. But for me, each of us has something — we’re still growing mentally and physically. They want to keep us in a frame in order to keep us safe. Music doesn’t fit into that frame.
“But music reminds me to slow down. Just be yourself. Just be Bao Tan. Just be who you want to be.”
A decade in, Thanh Bui now sees a future in which the lessons of SOUL can be applied to millions of Bao Tans, nationwide. In 2020, he opened a preschool that was designed in direct partnership with the pioneering educators of Reggio Emilia, Italy — one he hopes can provide a template that, in time, will transform early childhood education across the country. He has partnered with a Finnish University, Turku, and Harvard’s Project Zero, to think through issues of accreditation and assessment. Instead of trying to invent everything from scratch, he has contracted with existing curriculum providers, such as the German program Kindermusik, which introduces infants and toddlers to music. And he has begun constructing a one-million-square-foot “learning city” that brings together a K-12 academy, a college, a performing arts academy, and a sports and entertainment complex.
“The world is changing,” he said amidst the din of passing motorbikes, taxis and dust. “So must the purpose of school. We have to reconnect the artistic and scientific sides of ourselves: artist and businessman. Dancer and Engineer. Children of Vietnam and citizens of the world. If we’re serious about changing the way the world sees us and the arts, we have to build a new ecosystem that puts creative education at the heart of learning.
“We are a country that is not afraid to look forward. But social mobility is still very difficult here. My parents felt that sense of helplessness. ‘Where is home? What’s going to be the future?’ But if we can give access to the arts to every kid in this country, we can help them understand their roots and develop a more holistic viewpoint on life.
“Not knowing who you are, not knowing your purpose, that’s the biggest problem in the world. This whole understanding of who am I? Straddling between different cultures and different sets of identities. That’s something we can all relate to in this modern interconnected world.”
As Thanh spoke, a young boy’s voice could be heard from one of the school’s practice rooms. He was singing a traditional Vietnamese ballad, beautiful and slow, and the sound of it brought tears to Thanh’s eyes.
“We’ve been at war with ourselves for a long time,” he continued, running his hands through a pompadour of thick black hair. “But the last 45 years have provided an unprecedented period of peace. The modern byproduct of that are people like myself, who can bridge the two worlds. We share the same story. And we’ve all been searching for that pathway home to understand who we are and what we stand for.
“When people think about Vietnam, we don’t want them to think about the war anymore; we’re tired of that. It’s time for the new stories — the stories of hope.”
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