Dear Reader,
In their new book, Belonging Without Othering, the john a. powell and Stephen Menendian write, “We must be able to tell stories that hold the complexity of people and life. It must be rooted and based on reality and representations of reality as well as a project of imagination. This means it must acknowledge our flaws, but not as permanently flawed or fallen” (p. 237). We must assume that two things are true: everyone is always doing the best that they can and everyone can always do better.
This paradox reminds me of the way we approached the work we did at Opal School - the way we tried to look at the stories we held and the people who held them - whether that was the children, or their families, or our colleagues. “We all make oopsies”, was an understood norm - one that adults were helped to internalize by watching children offer grace and patience to one another. When things went wrong, we were in the habit of inviting “do-overs” that helped everyone consider what might have been successful if there had been more or awareness or information - and literally doing things over to achieve an outcome that worked better for everyone. It was a way to revise the story right on the spot. I think that when I was first aware of these practices, I didn’t really believe they could make things better. I couldn’t imagine. But they did. No one needed to be punished. No one needed to feel worse in order to be better. They just needed to have better options, and to be offered a chance to try again.
My story of behavior and consequences and discipline changed as I was able to imagine a story of human beings who only ever are making efforts to belong - and who sometimes make oopsies and who not only are able to but always want to do better when they know better. That’s the whole thing - when we know better - when we can imagine better - we can do better. That’s one of the powers of story.
In his essay "The Most Human Art", Scott Russell Sanders writes: “What stories at their best can do is lead our desires in new directions—away from greed, toward generosity; away from suspicion, toward sympathy; away from an obsession with material goods, toward a concern for spiritual goods."
We can choose to craft those stories.
We can craft stories that, as Rebecca Solnit has described, help us uncover a kind of courage and creativity and love that is willing to swim up out of the wreckage that lies around us now -- because people are ravenous for it. I believe that a process of co-creation with children has the potential to show us how. 10-year-old Ollie asked an important question: “What would happen if we didn’t change any of this in our own classroom - how are we going to stop it from happening in the world?” It’s so critical that we start to tell the story of school as the place where we practice writing new stories about who we are, how we are together, and the world we want to live in. Our current stories need to be re-imagined. Consider the many ways that story is being used to terrify us and, therefore, to control us. Story can just as easily be employed to help us imagine something we’d much rather be.
This week, our friend Sam Chaltain posted an article on Substack quoting the work of Angelo Patri, who wrote A Schoolmaster of the Great City in which he writes: “The greatest fallacy of child education is the ‘training for the future’ idea. Training for the future means dying for the present….How blind we are! First we kill and then we weep for that which we have slain.”
We’re not blind or stupid. But the story we are telling of children, and childhood, and school, and care work - is not a story that ends well.
powell and Menendian underscore this point: “The story we tell and live by plays an oversized role in the construction of belonging and creation of the social other. … There doesn’t appear to be anything fixed or rigidly determined abut the story we tell and live in. Humans have an uncanny ability to expand narratives indefinitely, graft new elements into old stories, mix and recombine elements, and build an organizing narrative about society of ever-increasing complexity. If this is right, it becomes imperative that we pay much greater attention to our stories…” (p. 223).
In an interview with The Ink this week, professor Eddie Glaude echoed this idea: “For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we've been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we're going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it's currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other. … the moral question has to always be the beating heart of the work. And that moral question is, 'Who do we take ourselves to be?'"
This is exactly the question we are asking in the Studio this month. Who do we want to be? What do we want school to be for? What story can we tell that will make it so?
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July and August in the Studio
Holding the Arts at the Heart
What does it take to flourish in living and learning?
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June Guideline: Mara Krechevsky
We're thrilled to welcome our dear friend Mara into conversation on June 5.
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NOW IN THE STUDIO
The Language of
COLLAGE
We are thrilled to partner with Kathryn Ann Myers to enhance opportunity in the Studio to explore and think with materials. Inspire and Transform members will enjoy monthly videos that include prompts, practices, and invitations to deepen their relationship with a variety of materials.
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WATCHING, LISTENING, READING
Good things:
Why play is serious work! and the International Day of Play
This article about Sacred Play
Looking forward to this new podcast series
On the rights of children
Connecting maps and stories - video
If you're in the Greater Portland area, we hope you'll join us Saturday at this special event
“Stuff that can kill your spirit is actually raw material to make with and build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.”
— Joy Harjo