Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte

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"To find work, no matter the path we have chosen, means coming out of hiding. Good work means visibility."

Chapter 6- The Awkward Way the Swan Walks: From Exhaustian to Wholeheartedness

"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest."

"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."

"You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after awhile. You need something to which you can give your full powers."

"You are like Rilke's Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; the swan doesn't cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. He does it by moving toward the elemental water that gives him grace and presence."

"Let go of all this effort and let yourself down, however awkwardly, into the waters of the work you want for yourself."

"Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine."

Teaching Art Sources & Resources by Adelaide Sproul (1971)

"Learning by doing was replaced by preoccupation with packaged, programmed, and predetermined teaching materials, and the humanization of education begun by the followers of Whitehead and Dewey was lost in a mass of data about norms, testing and curriculum plans."

"..powerful urge to create and explore.."

We encourage artists and students to "search their environment with children and to help them use what they find as fuel for creative learning and growing."

"An adult who is relaxed and openly curious can observe and probe new territory with children, learning as they learn and helping them to formulate questions and make connections that are valid."

"Each child must be allowed to choose his own point of departure from a central store of possibilities provided... and to follow his particular interest as it leads him out from the starting point towards many possible relationships. It is this organic growth from the center out that makes for sound learning..."

"The children left with no complaints and I asked the teacher, How did you ever manage that? How did you dare? She replied, Every year I spend more time teaching less."

"The reverberations this experience started in my thinking, at a time when my own teaching was packed with content at the expense of breathing and thinking, continue to be compelling, and I realize more forcefully all the time that learning is not a matter of action so much as it is a chance to absorb, to take time to look and feel and wonder."

"We become panicky if we leave them (students) to watch and listen and choose."

"Delight in how things feel is inseparable from the act of discovery. We begin to turn off children's sense of touch early with the constant admonition "Don't Touch!" ... Direct experience of the way things feel is necessary to the development of an expressive vocabulary, and information that comes through fingers and toes must not be disregarded."

"This teaching to the needs of the whole person changes the usual expectation for pace and accomplishment. Progress is made along a broad and by no means straight front, but it seems to be real progress, not just a technical performance."

"The art period must be lifted out of the context of busywork - something to do when you have finished your lesssons  - and given the dignity of its rightful place at the center of the curriculum."

"We cannot save the paints and clay for later because they are too messy; they must be as available as paper and pencils if they are to be used for real communication."

"It is this rediscovery that makes the delight and the excitement within learning and brings fresh insights and renewed enthusiasm to teachers each time it happens." 

"This book, the result of years of poking and prodding materials from the earth, comes from the convictions borne of that continuing experience. These convictions have been strengthened at crucial points along the way by my teachers and associates and pupils, and more recently, by Nancy Newman, whose interest and understanding have been a constant strength."

Teaching Artists and the Future of Education by Nick Rabkin, Michael Reynolds, Eric Hedberg, and Justin Shelby

"A majority of artists are men nationally, but two-thirds of TAs are women. TAs are more racially diverse than artists nationally. They are also better educated. Half have master’s degrees and two-thirds have degrees in an art form. One in eight has a degree in education, and one in six has been certified to teach by a state board of education. Their average age is 45, and the average TA has 12 years of teaching experience. Most enter the field in their early to mid-30s. A large majority, 70 percent, of the managers of the programs for which TAs work have worked as teaching artists themselves, and 59 percent are still teaching artists."

"TAs teach primarily because they enjoy the work and because it is a way to earn money in their artistic field. Many are motivated to teach in order to contribute to their community and social change. Most believe that teaching makes them better artists."

"The characteristics of good teaching cluster in three categories:

§ Good teaching is student centered. It starts with students’ interests and what they already know, offers them real challenges, choices and responsibilities, and features curriculum that connects, rather than fragmenting, ideas across subject areas.

§ Good teaching is cognitive. Learning is the consequence of thinking and making work that demonstrates mastery of meaningful ideas and compelling problems. Good teaching employs the range of communicative media – including the arts – and makes student reflection a regular part of the learning experience.

§ And good teaching is social. Students learn better together. The classroom is a community, and students are its citizens. Teachers nurture the community and provide intellectual, emotional, and social supports to students. (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000) (Perkins, 2010) (Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde, 2005) (Smith, Lee, & Newman, 2001)"

"We found this approach to teaching, in some respects, is a consequence of dispositions woven into TAs’ identities as artists and the complex of mental processes that are integral to making works of art – vision and planning; imagination; discipline; attention to detail; seeing the whole; pattern making, finding and breaking; reflection, revision and assessment; persistence; judgment; spontaneity and play among them."

"The alienation that is too prevalent in many schools does not end when an artist walks into a classroom. TAs must win students’ commitment quickly to accomplish anything of significance in the brief hours they spend together. Principals and teachers we interviewed confirmed that they are very good at that. “Perhaps it’s because they don’t have all the proscriptions and requirements that teachers have. They get an energy flowing right away,” a teacher told us."

"TAs frequently spoke of finding ways to connect curriculum to the world outside the classroom and to students’ own experiences. They did not, as some might fear, suggest that students’ interests should dictate curriculum, or that the norms of school behavior should be abandoned to develop student voice. TAs indicated that they found that students want to understand their own world, but they also want to broaden it."

"TAs take advantage of their novelty, capture students with appealing tasks and skills, create a “safe space” where students can take risks, and quickly get students started with simple assignments and simple rules, allowing them considerable freedom to make aesthetic choices themselves." 

"Opening assignments are designed to yield reliably good results, build students’ confidence, and whet their appetites. Warm ups, exercises artists themselves use to get their minds in gear and move them into a creative modality, are usually done in groups, connect students with each other, and act as a gateway into the content of the lesson."

 

"We learn best by exploring questions we find compelling, and good curriculum poses compelling questions about big themes, concepts, and problems. These can almost always be explored through multiple lenses, using the disciplinary tools of different subjects to develop understanding."

"Artists reflect on their work. They measure its progress against their vision. They imagine how it will “work” for others. They tinker, tweak, and revise. They make judgments based on intuition and imagination, trial and error, and learn from mistakes. These are sophisticated meta-cognitive functions, and they are assessment practices that are authentic to artistic production. They are one important way artists learn and get better at what they do. That is, of course, what we hope students will do, too – learn and get better at what they do."

"Building critical skills like systems thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, empathy and innovation. (Institute of Play, 2010)"

"Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote, “Education in the arts is more important than ever. In the global economy, creativity is essential…The best way to foster that creativity is through arts education.” (Italics added.) (President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 2011)"

"Teaching artists lead isolated professional lives. They need communities that support them professionally. Some are emerging in study sites, focused exclusively on TAs. Others are more fluid and include TAs and their partners in education – classroom teachers and arts specialists. We recommend that these networks and associations be developed everywhere."

"Too much training and professional development appears to be aimed at new TAs, and not enough is designed to challenge and advance the development of veterans. Too much training is limited to orienting TAs to the logistical requirements of programs, and not enough to the big ideas and concepts that make the work coherent and powerful." 

"TAs are hungry for professional development that conforms to the qualities of good teaching: centered on the practice and experience of TAs themselves, built on a foundation of big ideas about the arts and learning, filled with hands-on project-based experiences, centered on meaningful questions from the field... and social."

"There is a need for specialized professional development in advanced topics like working with special populations..."

"Some elements of professional development are best provided by programs themselves, of course, but some elements are common to virtually all programs, and communities can (and in some cases already are) provide professional development that cuts across many programs. We recommend such efforts be developed in all communities and that they are nationally networked."




Read the Teaching Artist Research Project Executive Summary here.

The Teaching Artist Research Project was conducted in a dozen communities from Boston to San Diego between 2008 and 2011. More than 3500 artists and program managers completed a survey, and over 200 key informants were interviewed in the various sites. The project was supported by grants from twenty-five funders – private foundations and state arts agencies. The entire report, from which this executive summary has been drawn, is available at the NORC’s website. NORC at the University of Chicago is an independent research organization headquartered in downtown Chicago with additional offices on the University of Chicago's campus and in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Maryland.

Margaret Wheatley Study Group

 

Find details here. 

"Relationship is all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationships to

everything else." (p23) 

"Free from the roles and routines that conceal the most of who we are." 

"Grace filled moments of greeting." 

"It’s often difficult to extend ourselves, to let down our guard… strangely what we say is not that important. We have ended the silence that keeps us apart." (p161) 

"Conversations only take place among equals…Those who act superior can’t help but react others as objects to accomplish their causes and plans. When we see each other as equals, we stop misusing them." (p163) 

"My sense of self expands --- I’m no longer locked inside a small self. I don’t feel alone or isolated. I feel here. I feel welcomed." (p137)  

"Staying curious about each other" 

"It’s not our differences that divide us. It’s our judgments about each other that do." 

"We don’t have to agree with each other in order to think together." (p213) 

"Listen for what surprises you, rather than for what you agree with." (p212) 

"All organisms have a need to connect and create" 

"When we serve others, we gain more than hope. We gain energy. People who volunteer for a community or service project often arrive straight from work, exhausted. But after several hours of meaningful volunteer work, they go home energized." (p131) 

"A self that fails to create itself as a contribution is irrelevant in a systems-seeking world… if our self-expression is not meaningful to others, we will not survive." (p52) 

"When we’re brave enough to risk a conversation, we have the chance to rediscover what it means to be human." (p162) 

"Human creativity and commitment are our greatest resources" 

"Anytime when making a decision ask yourself “Is this decision going to bring people together? Will it weave a stronger web?… In what I am about to do, am I turning toward others or turning away?” 

"The simplest way to discover what’s meaningful is to notice what people talk about and where they spend their energy." (p77) 

"It helps to put ideas, proposals, and issues on the table as experiments to see what’s meaningful to people rather than as recommendations for what should be meaningful to them." (p77) 

"No one can create sufficient stability and equilibrium for people to feel secure and safe. Instead as leaders we must help people move into a relationship with uncertainty and chaos." (p126) 

"Instead of fleeing from the fearful place of chaos or trying to rescue people from it, leaders can help people stay with the chaos, help them walk through it together, and look for the new insights and capacities that always emerge." (p127) 

"The conditions of freedom and connectedness are kept vibrant by focusing on what’s going on in the heart of the community rather than being fixated on the forms and rules of the community." (p50) 

"What called us together? What did we believe was possible together that was not possible alone? If we stay with these questions and don’t try to structure relationships through policies and doctrines, we can create communities that thrive in the paradox (of freedom and community)." (p50) 

"Most of us were raised in a culture that told us that the way to manage for excellence was to tell people exactly what they had to do and then make sure they did it. But you can’t direct people into excellence: you can only engage them enough so that they want to do excellent work."

 
"The primary task of being a leader is to make sure that the organization knows itself… A good 
leader supports a continuous conversation about organizational identity and how it is changing as it does its work in a changing world." (p69) 

"People do not need the intricate directions, timelines and organization charts that are assumed to be necessary. These are not how people accomplish good work; they are what impede contributions. But people need a great deal from their leaders. They need information, access to one another, resources, trust and follow through—all while helping everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be (p70). 

"When we’re so overwhelmed with tasks that we have no time to reflect, it is very important that the leader create time for people to remember why they’re doing this work. Who are we serving by doing this work?" (p128)

"Just 3 Rules – take care of yourself, take care of each other, take care of this place" (p51)

"People want to love their organizations. Love is saying yes to belonging. When we say yes to an
organization and agree to belong, we are called to new ways of living."

And the Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman

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"All I can say is Hallelujah.... For Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, changing the words Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property to the Pursuit of Happiness."

"Lincoln was always scribbling notes and putting them into his hat. With his hat on, he was seven feet tall."

"Everyone is beautiful. Everyone makes you proud. Everyone breaks your heart."

"[Jefferson's] friend, the Polish Freedom Fighter Tadeusz Kosciuszko, left money in his will to be given to Jefferson to free and educate his slaves. But the task was overwhelming and he did not get it done."

"The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk, but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. - Jefferson"

"History makes you hungry."

"THINK SMALL is my new motto. It helps me handle the complicated too-muchedness of it all."

"[Benjamin Franklin] believed in doing good everyday. He made charts and had daily goals. The morning question: What good shall I do this day? Evening question: What good have I done today?"



5-8am / Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness; contrive day's business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast.
8am-12pm / Work.
12-2pm / Read or overlook my accounts, and dine.
2-6pm / Work.
6-10pm / Put things in their places, supper, music, or diversion, or conversation; examination of the day.
10pm-5am / Sleep."

"He aspired to be a gentleman and, when he was still a teenager, wrote "George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation."

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer

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"Ask me whether what I have done is my life."

"... the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me... I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice."

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

"Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening."

"The word vocation itself is rooted in the Latin word for voice. Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear."

"An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for 'wholeness' is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of."

"The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. The soul is like a wild animal - tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods ..."

"True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as 'the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.'"

"Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question 'Who am I' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no selfhood outside of relationship."

"Teaching, I was coming to understand, is my native way of being in the world. Make me a cleric, or a CEO or a poet or a politician and teaching is what I will do. Teaching is at the he

"We must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves - and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits."

"self-care is never a selfish act"

"Had I not followed my despair... I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do, causing further harm to myself, to the people and projects with which I worked, and to a profession that is well worth doing - by those who are called to do it."

"no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possible worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment."

"A clearness committee -- a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help you discover your own inner truth."

"By then it was obvious, even to me, that my desire to be president had much more to do with my ego than with the ecology of my life - so obvious that when the clearness committee ended, I called the school and withdrew my name from consideration. Had I taken the job, it would have been very bad for me and a disaster for the school."

"Dorothy Day -- Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

"One sign that I am violating with my own nature in the same of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess. [Burnout] does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place."

"Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection."

"'You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you... do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?'"

"The problem with living at the high altitude is simple: when we slip, as we always do, we have a long, long way to fall... I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think - an activity I greatly value - but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body that is farther from the ground."

"There were the visitor's who began by saying, 'I know exactly how you feel...' Whatever comfort or counsel these people may have intended to speak, I heard nothing beyond their opening words, because I knew they were peddling a falsehood: no one can fully experience another person's mystery. Paradoxically, it was my friends' empathetic attempt to identify with me that made me feel even more isolated."

"One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless.. In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free.

"Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves - the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone 'out there' into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others."

"Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with one another, people who can lead the rest of us to a place of 'hidden wholeness' because they have been there and know the way."

"Emerge with the capacity to lead the rest of us toward community, toward our complex and inexplicable caring for each other."

"If you can't get out of it, get into it!"

"The average group can tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe nothing good is happening and something must be dying."

"The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands."

"The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative - if it was tested for good reasons - is always a source of new learning."

"By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge."

"We do not need to be the fear we have"

"Rilke--- living the questions"

"Metaphors are more than literary devices, of course: most of us use metaphors, albeit unconsciously, to name our experience of life."

"Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring - and scatters them with amazing abandon... I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die... On the surface, it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown."

"Opposites do not negate each other... they need each other for health"

"I confused the teaching with the teacher."

"Before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions of rebirth are being created...It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave 'mud on my face' ... may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow."

"Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again."

"If you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it along."

"Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them - and receive them from others when we are in need."

"Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act... Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed."

The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game by Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski, Matt Lamothe and Dave Eggers

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The Exquisite Book is a project based on the Surrealist game called the Exquisite Corpse. The book is a modified version of the game, played by one hundred contributing contemporary fine artists, illustrators, designers and comic artists. Each artist contributed one page to the book. The first artist was given a few words to inspire their drawing. Each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded their own. Each artist had a horizon line in their image that starts on the left side of the page and ends on the right. Where the horizon line of the first artist’s page ends, is where it begins for the next artist. Each artist was given two weeks to complete their page.