Dear Reader,
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Art is a place … where ideas and people are made welcome.
In the United States these days, we’re hearing the word “unity” thrown around a lot, which has created potential to heighten our understanding of the concept, and its value. Words can be slippery. Their meanings are often assumed, without having fully lived into their relationship to what we do. How do we struggle with that relationship, how do we embrace it? Unity is one of those words we seem to naturally agree sounds good - sounds like something we all want. But the world inside that word is at war.
There are calls for unity that are calls to fall in line behind a powerful leader and comply with his directives - seeming to say that there is room for you here as long as you relinquish your ideas, concerns, and your feelings. And then there are calls for unity that seem to be built on assumptions that unity is only possible when we aren’t trying to demonize and dehumanize others. In that sense of the word, unity is an effort to strengthen belonging without othering. The Othering and Belonging Institute defines belonging this way:
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Having a meaningful voice and the opportunity to participate in the design of political, social, and cultural structures that shape one’s life — the right to both contribute and make demands upon society and political institutions.
Ultimately, we’re all looking for belonging. Human beings do. It’s just that some versions of voice and design and demands are predicated on a belief in rightness, winning, scarcity, and zero-sum relationships - and the vision that emerges from those beliefs places a high value on control, and certainty.
Regardless of what we think it means to participate, we’re all seeking belonging, and we’re all looking for answers - another thing that humans do.
There are answers that serve an effort to end the need for questions. And there are answers that frame invitations to new kinds of practice, new questions, continual reflections. There are answers for which truth is irrelevant, and there are answers that support us to keep searching. In school, very often, belonging is the prize when the answers are right, final, measurable, standardized. Good job, gold star, you are right, and therefore, you belong. That’s a kind of unity. It is a unity that requires fidelity to the “totalitarianism of the same” - a term used by Peter Moss and Gunilla Dahlberg to describe the desire to make the “Other into the Same (The Role of the Pedagogista in Reggio Emilia, p. 128)” - to reduce complexity, to silence dissent, to induce compliance.
As these issues add context to being alive in this particular time, also this week, in the Studio, we’ve been wondering together about the value of the arts as an antidote to totalitarianism. Some members have brought forward a wondering about whether art is always political. Olivia Laing writes:
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Art can’t forcibly induce a change in behaviour. It’s not a re-education pill. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read War and Peace. It’s work, for which art can, however, provide us with radiant materials. Art can’t win an election or bring down a president. It can’t stop the climate crisis, cure a virus or raise the dead. What it can do is serve as an antidote to times of chaos. It can be a route to clarity, and it can be a force of resistance and repair, providing new registers, new languages in which to think.
Art can teach us how to think without the need to worry about what we think. In the same essay that references the Moss and Dahlberg concept of totalitarianism of the same, the authors also reference Erin Manning's definition of artfulness: "the momentary capture of an aesthetic yield in an evolving ecology (p. 146)." Like play, art relies on our attention to the ever changing context of the moment that we're in. Artfulness, playfulness, creativity, imagination, flow, curiosity, attention, flexibility, experimentation - these are not valued habits of mind in a totalitarian image of unity. The arts provide us with "radiant materials" to capture our relationship to the moment - to attend to our attention - which is all we ever have and all we ever should need to feel like we belong.
Rick Rubin writes:
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Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.
Seriousness saddles the work with a burden. It misses the playful side of being human. The chaotic exuberance of being present in the world. The lightness of pure enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake.
In play, there are no stakes. No boundaries. No right or wrong. No quotas for productivity. It’s an uninhibited state where your spirit can run free.
The best ideas arise most often and easily through this relaxed state.
Putting importance on the work too soon stirs up instincts of caution (p. 354).
We can take thinking and learning and teaching seriously without insisting on sameness, standardization, and scripted programs.
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The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be. Rubin
Also, maybe, the world is only as free as it allows its children to be. An openness to uncertainty and not knowing and having a go at things is required of teachers who are serious about freedom, and empathy, and joy. But we know programatic instruction that does not value play or the arts is alive and well. This is in large part because these attitudes of openness are required and we mostly don’t have them. We want the children to have them - we very often value them - but we overlook the need to strengthen them in ourselves. (That opportunity to strengthen these values is, by the way, our motivation to facilitate and grow the Studio for Playful Inquiry. And that is very joyful work.)
In her book, We Are Free to Change the World, based on the writings of Hannah Arendt, the author writes, “Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.” Matt and I feel so fortunate to be working alongside you.
in solidarity and with appreciation,
WATCHING, LISTENING, READING
Good things:
It's not too late to join us for Holding the Arts at the Heart: Flourishing in Living and Learning. We are having so much fun! We'd love to have you.
The Parable of the Sower started this week - in Octavia Butler's imagination when she published the book in 1993.
We like this discussion on 10 Percent Happier with the authors of Your Brain on Art.
There is a long history of being afraid of fiction.
Let's return to a more expansive dialogue about the way we think about learning to read.
One more thing:
“The ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging.”
— John O'Donohue