You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps Of the Imagination, Edited by Katharine Harmon

Find details here.

To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey by Parker Palmer (a master teacher offers a new model for authentic teaching and learning)

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To Teach Is to Create a Space....


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To learn is to face transformation.

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To learn the truth is to enter into relationships requiring us to respond as well as initiate, to give as well as take.

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Knowing is a profoundly communal act.

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The conventional pedagogy is not only non-communal but anti-communal. Students are made to compete with one another... in many classrooms cooperation among students goes by the name cheating.

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We become manipulators when education denies and destroys community... Throughout our education we learn to manipulate in order to survive, and then we carry that habit into our postgraduate lives. If we gained knowledge through collaborative, communal process, we would possess a knowledge that could be used in cooperative, not manipulative, ways.

This style of teaching persists because it gives teachers power. With power comes security: the security of controlling the classroom agenda, of avoiding serious challenges to one's authority, of evading the embarrassment of getting lost in territory where one does not know the way home. Teachers are unlikley to relinquish such power even in the face of students who hunger for another way to learn.

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I call the pain that permeates education " the pain of disconnection."

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Real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject.

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The way we teach depends on the way we think people know; we cannot amend our pedagogy until our epistemology is transformed.

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inquiry vs authority as the center of the classroom....

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There is a knowledge that originates not in curiosity or control but compassion... A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to live. Here the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we known and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community's bonds.

Curiosity and control create a knowledge that distances us from each other and the world, allowing us to use what we know as a plaything and to play the game by our own self-serving rules. But a knowledge that springs from live will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability.

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How can the places where we learn to know become the places where we also learn to love?

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Find details here.

Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art Edited by Tonya Foster & Kristin Prevallet

"Collaboration is a calling to work with and for others in the service of something that transcends artistic ego and, as such, has to do with love, survival, generosity, and a conversation in which the terms of language are multidimensional. I always work with people around me because it's a way to be in the world together and to make something that has intrinsic value. It is a statement of connection, camaraderie, and it also goes beyond a particular relationship or duet and becomes what William Burroughs called 'the third mind."

-Anne Waldman-

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"Whatever the scope of your plans, the important thing, of course, is to begin."

-Susan Karwoska-

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"A time limit encourages quick, intuitive decision making."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"once they have discovered their theme, [students] will be amazed at how everything becomes relevant to it."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"Establishing the conviction within a student that he or she is creative is the critical first step... In the Image-Making workshop this belief emerges in two ways: when the student sees his or her own personal style or "signature" emerge in the verbal and the visual work, and when the student sees that the work has meaning and significance to others."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"The two of us teach after the fact, as opposed to the conventional practice that begins with the goal (or the rationale) followed by examples. The students work first so intuition can operate freely, and later learn the why. We give simple instructions that allow students to work directly with the materials. Only after the work is done do we respond to it. Our responses are always based on finding the uniqueness in each work-- not what we think it out to be, but what is there."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"As teachers, of course, we never tell the students that they are going to do exciting work, that it will be a lot of fun and that they will learn important things about themselves. Nothing would be more intimidating... The excitement comes afterwards, when we help them to see what they have done. When students begin, on their own, to see possibilities in the material that they had not seen before, they cross the line from being doers to becoming makers."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"In the structure of true education, creativity is the foundation, and not the ornament."

-Rosalind Pace & Marcia Simon-

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"The William Burroughs Fold-in: Take two different pages from an outside text (magazine, article or book) and cut each in half vertically. Paste the mismatched pages together. Then create a new text."

-Anne Waldman-

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"We have unwittingly brought the habits of channel-surfing to bear in the space of the gallery. We act as though art should strike us immediately, or not at all. We simply catch a glimpse and consume another image."

-Scott Herndon & Kristin Deombek-

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Find details here and here.

Youth Learning on Their Own Terms: Creative Practices and Classroom Teaching by Leif Gustavson

"I have become acutely aware of the disconnect between the was in which many school districts and schools design learning environments and the ways in which youth design learning environments for themselves..."

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"Common culture is the everyday practice of producing popular culture like graffiti murals, zines, and turntable pieces. Ian's practice of zine writing for example, is a part of his everyday life.... Ian's creative practice is part of who he is and how he understands the world around him. The way he lives his life informs his zine making and his zine making influences the way in which he lives day to day.

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"..shifting our sense of a learning environment as an imposed structure to an infrastructure... Often when teaching and learning are considered a structure, the outcome of the learning is predetermined... Conversely, pedagogy as infrastructure is dynamic and generative. Students build off the framework of the class, utilizing tactic and conceptual knowledge to build new skills and knowledge. Pedagogy as infrastructure is designed around rituals, habits of mind and body, and criteria. The objective of learning is not for everyone to arrive at the same conclusion."

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"Youth also constantly interpret through their creative practices. The act of interpretation enables youth to evaluate their own work as well as construct meaning out of other people's work. It is these skills of youth practice that should in part become the practice of working and learning in classrooms."

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"How can the work of youth influence educators in designing learning environments that are rigorous, interesting, and personally meaningful for both youth and teachers?"

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"How can we take advantage of the skills and conceptual knowledge that youth bring with them to school? Instead of viewing them as empty vessels needing to be filled or as being deficient in some way, we need to see youth as complex people with valuable life and work experiences."

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"Moving from interpretation to appropriation: youth culture as legitimate work and learning... When students learn about poetry in schools, for example, they often talk about what a poem means. Teaching and learning as appropriation talk within the practice."

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"How can the ways in which thee youth work in their creative practices - the intrinsic aesthetic or crafting that underlies the practices - influence the daily activity, the ways of working, in classrooms?"


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"Placing popular culture at the center of the curriculum legitimates it and allows students to speak about their own experiences within the classroom. Nevertheless, youth do not necessarily want their cultural practices to be legitimated or co-opted by teachers or schools... If the teacher's interest in the art for is merely a tool of motivation or interpretation, students will read this as an ultimate dismissal of their interests, rather than as a 'cool' way to learn."

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"Youth Habits of Mind and Body in Creative Practices:

- communities of practice
- experimentation
- evaluation and assessment
- interpretation
- performance
- reflection"

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"In order to sustain their creative practices, youth are involved in making connections with groups of people who share their interests. These groups are commonly called 'communities of practice'... A community of practice is a group of people connected through a shared interest in an activity."

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"According to Reinsmith (1997), people instinctively want to make meaning out of experience. In order for meaning to occur, people need freedom to fiddle around with new ideas and new object, to try ideas that they have, and to -- perhaps most important -- make mistakes. These mistakes are what enable people to refine ideas and attempt something else. It is in this refining and course altering that one develops understandings regarding skills or concepts."

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"Ethnography makes visible the ordinary and taken-for-granted details of what particular people do together. It is sensitive to nuances. It identifies cultural frames for acting and making sense that vary and change as individuals and groups occupy differing positions in society.... Ethnographers approach their phenomena realizing that they know little and that people who are part of the phenomena, the "natives," know a lot. With this realization, ethnographers position themselves as the learnings and the people who are part of the phenomena as the teachers. They observe, interview and participate in order to better understand the people whom they are studying. When we make this analogus to teaching, it is our job as teachers to to figure out how our students are mathematicians, historians, writers and scientists in their lives, instead of assuming that they are not or that they need to be taught how to be."

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"Multiple forms of performance creative authentic reasons for students to experiment further, reflect on their work, evaluate its efficacy, and interpret audience reactions."

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"Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process." -Dewey-

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"When educators in investigate and acknowledge the creative practices of youth within their pedagogy, opportunities for authentic learning emerge: teachers tune their teaching practices more closely to the ways in which youth learn and make meaning in their everyday lives."

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"In classroom environments driven by prepacked curricula or standardized testing, students are figured as finite and closed systems, lacking essential skills and knowledge. These classrooms lack the open-ended fluidity of authentic, meaningful learning and fail to acknowledge the disciplinary strengths that youth bring with them, regardless of background. They make it difficult for students and teachers to develop a shares sense of how they can earn together."

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"Inquiry based learning honors the personhood of each of our students and provides an opportunity to reframe traditional questions."

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"Through this recasting of teacher and student roles as well as how learning looks, sounds, and feels, we transform the classroom into a youthspace where youth ways of knowing are embraced and put to work."

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"Perhaps going to school would not be such an alienating endeavor to many youth if adults in positions of power recognized and valued the many ways youth learn on their own terms."

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"Perhaps by recognizing the role creative practices play in how youth learn... school can be a viable and essential space through which youth and adults can learn together."

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Chapter 1 : THE WRITING LIFE OF A ZINE MAKER
Chapter 2: THE SHIFTING CREATIVE PRACTICES OF A PUERTO-RICAN AMERICAN YOUTH
Chapter 3: SCRATCHING, CUTTING, AND JUGGLING: THE TURNTABLIST AS A 21st CENTURY SCHOLAR
Chapter 4: TEACHING AND LEARNING: A SHARED PRACTICE

Find more details here.

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Phillips

This altered book was first published in 1970. Cross out poems, illustrations and paintings are made from W H Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. The final product was a new story about Bill Toge, whose name appears when the word "together" or "altogether" appears in Mallock's original text.











The full text treatment can be seen here.

Find other details here.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson, Ph.D.

"Businesses everywhere say they need people who are creative and can think independently. But the argument is not just about business. It's about having lives with purpose and meaning in and beyond whatever work we do."

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"Creativity is very much like literacy."

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"When we connect with our own energy, we're more open to the energy of other people. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others."

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Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done."

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"If I saw further it was because I stood on the shoulders on giants."
-Isaac Newton-

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On "Flow" as Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls it or "The Element" as Sir Ken Robinson calls it:

"Being in the zone is about using your particular kind of intelligence in an optimal way... When people are in the zone, they align themselves with a way of thinking that works best for them."

"Feeling more like myself than ever before..."

"The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.... they are doing the thing they love and in doing it they feel like their most authentic selves. They find time passes differently and that they are more alive, more centered and more vibrant that at any other times."

"Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted. Activities we don't like drain us in minutes.... when people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it."

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"For most people, a primary component of being in their Element is connecting with other people who share their passion and a desire to make the most of themselves through it." --- "FINDING YOUR TRIBE" as he calls it.... "tribes are circles of influence."

"THE ALCHEMY OF SYNERGY"

"What connects a tribe is a common commitment to the thing they feel born to do."

"...she finds herself with a group of people who see the world the way she does, who allow her to feel her most natural, who affirm her talents, who inspire her, influence her, and drive her to be her best. She is close to her trie self when she is among actors.....being a part of this tribe brings her to the Element."

"Tribe membership.. helps people become more themselves , leading toward a greater sense of personal identity. On the other hand, we can easily lose our identity in a crowd, including a group of fans. Being a fan is about being partisan; cheering or jeering and finding joy in victory and agony in defeat. This might be fulfilling and thrilling in many ways, but it normally it doesn't take you to the Element as a means of self-realization."

"Many people don't find their Element because they don't have the encouragement or the confidence to step outside their established circle of relationships."

"When people close to you discourage you from taking a particular path, they usually believe they are doing it for your own good... And the fact is that the average office worker probably does have more financial security that the average jazz trumpeter. But it is difficult to feel accomplished when you're not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something 'for your own good' is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are."

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Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. Hear him speak on TED.

Find details on the book here and here.

We Make the Road by Walking Conversations on Education and Social Change with Myles Horton and Paulo Freire

"For me there is a certain sensualism in writing and reading - and in teaching, in knowing. I cannot separate them. Knowing for me is not a neutral act, not only from the political point of view, but from the point of view of my body, my sensual body. It is full of feelings, if emotions, of tastes." (PF)

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"I am convinced that in order for us to create something, we need to start creating." (PF)

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"One of the tasks of the educator is also to provoke the discovering of need for knowing and never to impose the knowledge whose need was not yet perceived." (PF)

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"Liberation and salvation are social events and not individual ones." (PF)

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On founding the Highlander Folk School:

"I knew I was going to do something in adult education in the mountains all along, but I didn't know what form it would take, how to go about it." (MH)

"I didn't know what I knew. But I kept talking about it and thinking about it, and that experience was kind of tucked away, not right up front. It was there in my psych, always nagging at me, but I couldn't quite get at it. The reason I couldn't get at it was because I was trying to fit things into the traditional way of doing things. I couldn't see how this was a part of anything that I knew anything about and I couldn't quite bring myself to think there were ways of doing things outside the system... It didn't really ring a bell very loud. The bell was ringing but was very low, and when it would start ringing I'd kind of cover it up so I wouldn't have to listen to it, because I didn't understand it." (MH)

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Find details here.

Learning To Love You More by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher

"Think of something encouraging you often tell yourself. For example: Everything will be ok. Or: Don't listen to them. Or: It'll blow over. Now make a banner, making sure to follow these instructions:

1. Draw each letter of the sentence on a large piece of colored construction paper or big squares of fabric. One letter per piece. Draw them blocky so you can cut them out.
2. Cut them out.
3. Glue each one onto a piece of construction paper or fabric that is a contrasting color.
4. Then glue the edges of all the pieces of paper or fabric together to make a banner.
5. Hang the banner in a place where you or someone else might need some encouragement, for example, across your bathroom. Or between two trees so that you and your neighbors can receive encouragement from it. Or in a gas station."










Find details here.

The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear by Paul Loeb

"Find people to be with who share your values and commitments, and who also have a sense of humor."
-Howard Zinn-

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"I believe people exist to be enjoyed... as the ocean or drifting clouds might be."
-Alice Walker-

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On how daydreaming improves efficiancy, assists creativity and regulates emotions:

"We are not computers, not machines. We have more in common with flowers than microchips."
-Rose Marie Berger-

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"I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are beaten and trampled underfoot... I decided that it is better to scream... It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live... silence is the real crime against humanity."
-Nadezhda Mandelstam-

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"Hope is folding paper cranes even when your hands get cramped and your eyes tired, working past blisters and paper cuts, simply because something in you insists on opening its wings."
-Elizabeth Barrette-

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A note scribbled in the margins of a line that reads "Hope is not the same as optimism."

Optimism is a perspective. Hope is a practice. Optimism as a way of seeing the world, and hope as a way of walking the world.




Find details here.

Disguised As A Poem: My Years Teaching at San Quentin by Judith Tannenbaum

"Hold onto what it is you want to do and, at the very same time, let go of all assumptions that you're going to get it done in the way you first planned."

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"I discovered that prisoners responded as I did to poems: as though they'd received bread, actual matter with the power to nourish."

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"In many ways, this self-doubt gave birth to me as a writer. For in writing words down on paper, or making up stories in my head, I could see what I saw without also considering someone else's point of view or having to explain myself clearly... In my imagination,. I was free from interference."

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"...Elmo didn't mean to challenge me. I had handed him the role of censor when, in fact, what my body interpreted as attacks, Elmo intended as invitations. Elmo wanted me to respond with my truth, to do my part to bridge the gap between us... what I perceived as a roadblock, he intended as an avenue for approach."

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Find details here.

A Simpler Way by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

"A french biologist describes the process of creating living things as bricolage - assembling parts and items in complicated arrangements, not because they fit some ideal design, but just because they are possible."

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"Too often we interpret refusual as resistance. We say that people innately resist change. But the resistance we experience from others is not to change itself. It is to the particular process of change that believes in imposition rather than creation. It is the resistance of a living system to being treated as a non-living thing. It is an assertion of the system's right to create. It is life insisting on its primary responsibility to create itself."

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"We encourage others to change only if we honor who they are now, We ourselves engage in change only as we discover that we might be more of who we are by becoming something different."

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"How do we create organizations that stay alive?"

"Rigidly certain organizations die early. They collapse from the weight of the structures they've erected to hold themselves up. If, as individuals we rigidify ourselves, we suffer the same fate. But there are other organizations with identities that are clear but curious. They explore the world by understanding who they are but inquiring about who also they might be...Structures are more temporary; they come and go to fit the demands of the present. Clear at their core, curious about their future, these organizations develop expansionary range."

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"We are naturally suited to be partners. The invitation to join with life will restore us to the world and evoke what is best about us."

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"Once individuals link together they become something different... Relationships change us, reveal us, evoke more from us.

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"The environment is invented by our presence in it."

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"It looks like a mess. It is a mess. And from the mess, a system appears that works."

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"Life always organizes as networks of relationships, spinning dense webs that can't be disentangled. As we organize, we keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much truth exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"

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"How many of us work in organizations that fulfill our desires? How many of us feel supported in our need to connect and create? Our organizations rarely reflect our need for meaning, connection and growth. Yet we continue to create new organizations because of our human need to be more, to do more. We notice possibilities. We notice one another, we see a need which calls us to respond, and we organize. Can organizations learn to sustain the engergy and desire that called them into being? Can organizations learn how to support us as self-organizing?

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"People want to love their organizations. 'Love.' writes Catholic theologian David Steindl-Rast 'is saying yes to belonging'
... if we agree to belong, we will feel called to new ways of living.

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"Here is another place from which to contemplate a simpler way. Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity or compliance. "

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"Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself."

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Find details here.

Better Together : Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam

"Reweaving [social webs] will also depend on our ability to create new spaces for recognition, reconnection, conversation and debate."

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"One often underestimated technique for creating new identities and bridging social distance, as well as for helping to create social capital in other ways, is telling stories."

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"A community of practice-- refers to informal groups of people who share knowledge and support one another in their common work. These are relationships with a purpose."

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"A good third place makes few demands on the people who gather there... A third place is a neutral ground where people from different walks of like in the community can meet and get to know one another, having in common perhaps only their desire to frequent this particular place."

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"Managing the spirit of the program and the close connection and constant communication that characterize it now will become harder as the program expands."

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A Case Study on Do Something:

"Everyone has experienced the supposedly open discussions manipulated toward a predetermined outcome, the supervisor who welcomes all ideas as long as they coincide with his own, the language of empowerment used to disguise control....

When you start coaching in Do Something you have to back off. That's the hardest part if you're a teacher and used to being in charge.... Let young people lead is the mantra repeated again and again...

adults... contribute... from the sidelines rather than from the field."

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon

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