STORY and The Inner Lives of Children: a further exploration of the theme of revisiting the treasures of childhood

STORY and The inner lives of children: a further exploration of the theme of revisiting the treasures of childhood

Here I examine how reading Daniel Pink’s thoughts about “Story” led me to exploring the work of Robert Coles, Harvard psychiatry professor. Researching his work as first encountered and seen on SOF – “Speaking of Faith” extended interviews. http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/ (Psychiatrist Robert Coles has spent his career exploring the inner lives of children. He says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them.)

I then watched the Video of his lecture at Harvard U. (Also - Noted his work with the Duke U. Center for Documentary Studies and Alex Harris’ books and magazines, such as, Double Take, written and edited in collaboration). “The Spiritual, Moral, and Inner Life of Children” is a wise and thoughtful interview with author, interviewer, Krista Tippett. It’s about retaining and not forgetting one’s childhood, capturing your own particularity and spontaneity. How to keep the unquenchable sense of curiosity about the world, of what it means to be human. The “Whys” that we hope our children continue to ask, that we need to continue to ask on our own. STORY is at the heart of it all. How do this and children’s budding political insights and a sense of fairness and justice inform a sense of Global Mindedness, of the Internationalism emphasized in the IB curriculum.

The urgent human need to hope in the face of fatefulness…the importance of STORY. How children represent God in drawings that explore the beyond. Arguing the profound, when their resolution to their arguments is that, ”…well God is God”. ART often clarifies their thoughts, in Picturing-the-Stories they have learned or invented, they comprehend at a deeper level. “How do you see God? Draw it out”.

Which questions do you continue to ask throughout a lifetime? Remember that. You too can connect to the freewheeling search for MEANING that is humanity’s eternal quest (Victor Frankel – Man’s Search for Meaning)

• Children’s witness and wisdom on view in their letters and drawings.
• Repossessing Virtue, transgression, forgiveness, and redemption big concepts to grasp, yet children explore such questions naturally, intuitively
• Living searchingly and gracefully even in the face of hardship
• They are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity, for they see us as we are.
• They ask “Why?” an important part of all of our lives, (the unexamined life is not worth living)
• Their insights are likely often ignored
• Whence your identity? What have you been given, what have you learned?
• The questions are often worth perpetually asking, since the answers are not fixed.
• Where comes justice? Where comes a sense of morality?
• Should we foster a rebelliousness that questions, does not settle, but continues to unsettle. Question any conventional beliefs. This seems healthy, yet too often the repressive attitude is that “children should be seen and not heard.”
• A merger of the natural curiosity about the world with speculation and storytelling. The stories that enrich a lifetime. Story naturally engages. draws us in, storytelling is quintessential to humanity's search for meaning, for mattering.
• Fundamental questions are daring, soulful, seeking, a spiritual quest. Are these not the essence of all the great epic stories?
• We are all hoping the answers will come, will reveal themselves somehow.
• Mystery is such an important part of it, Mystery with power and magic therein contained.
• Rejoice in the mystery, the alluring unknown, as a vital aspect of our lives.
• The emergence of our being is formed by our setting, our parents, teachers, and our society--by the stories we are told, or happen to overhear.
• Connecting with the mystery is profound.
• Are children born with proclivities to delve, probe, to poke around, to know? One must be curious to grow. This is just part of their being, they come to us thus.
• If this curiosity is celebrated and encouraged by the adult world, it can lead to a relationship with The Something More, with the Beyond Ourselves, with God, Goddess, All-That-Is.
• Children are all searching for answers about what we are doing here.
• Frailty and Loss, suffering, vulnerability, grasping for answers in the face of suffering, religion is there to help us ponder, to reflect and pursue seeking redemption. Consider religious experience that arises naturally, just listen closely to a group of young children, you will often be amazed by the profundity of their thought.
• As narrators we tell stories, at the heart of all traditions. It is a connection that children know how to listen to stories. A world full of unfolding stories, an echoing presence stories that will touch you to the bone. Struggling with our downsides and our upsides, our lesser self and our more actualized self. We find all these in stories.
• The truths that can come through a larger calling of stories, larger than life figures that call to us and work their way under our skin, the heroes and heroines.
• Curious and alive imaginations, ready to probe, these we should wish for our children.
• Stories that are lyrical and poetical, symbolical, metaphorical.
• They will speak it out if we do not inhibit them. Listen to them. Listen to their stories.
• Often seen, the Qualities of childhood that mark later lives of leadership.
• Of all denominations, certain convergences, Spirit and the Mystery, our need for ritual, for celebrating, for reflecting and pondering. They know, they know. Prayer as an aspect of our urgent need to HOPE.
• Listen to their exploratory theology.
• Encourage their STORY-making.

Coles is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning series: Children of Crisis and The Moral Intelligence of Children, and The Spiritual Intelligence of Children.

The Crucial Importance of Play

Here are Some Thoughts…Reflecting on PLAY as an essential quality for our civilization's future as suggested by Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and my attendance at the annual conference of TASP – The Association for the Study of Play, http://www.tasplay.org/about.html at Georgia State University, in March 10-13, 2010

Play can grow talents and intelligences

Play and character development

Spirited Play and playful spirit

The essential nature of play in developing empathy, purpose, an indispensable part of being human

Play as a means of glimpsing the best in humanity and the divine

Research seminal thinkers that D. Pink introduces such as The National Institute for Play, Dr. Stuart Brown, Director

As an intelligent social animal, play is intelligible to all humans. We naturally “get it.” It transcends all cultures.

Spontaneously play is done for its own sake and produces pleasure and joy. There is choice if the individual is safe and not in want, play naturally unfolds.

PLAY is “Guilt-free purposelessness”

The science of play seen in studies of play in behavioral studies of animals and humans

By all measures we can observe the universality of play

TASP – The Association for the Study of Play as a source of the most prescient contemporary researchers in the field of play and human development

Play is not trivial, for instance follow the trail from the very beginnings of life in the interactions of parent and child, the joyful experiences for both child and parent that now can be witnessed through the medium of medical imagery.

Animals and humans who are deprived of play are rigid and lack adaptability. They do not seek out novelty, they are trapped in the past, the previously experienced.

Our capacity to play has been evolutionarily necessary. It has been invaluable in our evolution as a species.

The practice for life that play enables…it is the borderland between our inside and the outside world. It is the interface between a playful view of the world and the realities of a world full of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Consider Competition and Contact in play such as: A natural emergence of testing one’s skills in competition.

Mark Beckoff, author and keynote speaker at TASP writes eloquently of play behavior in animals, particularly wolves.

An amazing Atlanta resource is the researcher, Olga Jarrett, PhD, Professor of Early Childhood Education at Georgia State University.

Play awakens something in the adult, which is relearning the languages that we forgot or vaguely remember from our childhood. And we see in the writings of Daniel Pink that this is pretty crucial stuff for our future success.

Play and the discovery of our natural talents: the role that this stage of trial-and-error experimentation, a willingness to chance. It represents a resonance of openness to life. Consider Play across the lifespan. Play’s importance cannot be underestimated…it is in synch with these times.

Risk-taking in play is exploring the edges of the dangerous, with some but not excessive risk. It is absolutely necessary, to allow the spontaneity in taking the actual risks. Play teaches the young what they can and cannot do. Without play, we can deprive youth of valuable lessons. It is reasonable to have challenging playgrounds, to deal with the tensions of exploring limits. We too often err on the side of caution: keeping their bodies safe but endangering their souls.

If those talents are given free reign, then empowerment and freedom, imaginative self-discovery may take place. This is nature’s way of saying “this is who you are and what you are.” Look back at what gave you joy as a child. (see my earlier posts on Revisiting Childhood in artists’ lives) Look at the successful lives of people who play. The terrifying but joyful risk-taking…if you can’t play at it, you can’t invest your entire self in it. Play can reinvigorate and renew your creativity. Videogames do give opportunities for imaginative thought and practicing certain life skills, as Pink observes.

Brain-imaging techniques demonstrate that areas crucial to learning get lit up by movement, it accelerates learning. Looking at the developing brain as the wealth of information in this field unfolds.

What role does ART play? Is it play as an integral component of the biological design of humans, art facilitates an ability to retain playful behavior throughout a lifetime.

Be resolved to play more--recovering this as a healthy part of our childhood inheritance. Healing the child within: start with rhythm and movement. They fill an empty heart with a sense of stepping outside of the urgency of time. Being in the moment.

Be about kindling and “following your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell suggested. Reach into visual and emotional images that becomes an internal show. Play is imbedded into you since you had childhood experiences with play. Consider DANCE--move it, shake it, and watch the smile grow. Watch the interview of Dr. Stewart Brown on the PBS “Speaking of Faith” blog.

Although these thoughts are not in the form of a cohesive essay, I believe they represent my pondering play and some of the fields I have been exploring since reading Daniel Pink and his writing about play as an essential sense to develop for success in the future.

Architects-in-Schools Program

A research trip over to the Dogwood Festival that was taking place the same day as the a.r.t.s.APS course, at Piedmont Park across the street from Grady HS, was very inspiring. There I found good information on “green construction technologies” that will be helpful for next school year’s Architects-in-Schools program that I will be piloting at E. Rivers Elementary. This will be a joint venture between the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Georgia Tech, and Southern Polytechnic College. Advanced level architecture students, interning architects, and volunteer practicing architects will deliver the program. We will use a curriculum developed by the Architectural Foundation of Oregon. I will be posting more information about this program and the inspiration for bringing it to Georgia soon. Sharing green construction techniques with students will add a broader dimension to their work with designing a built environment.

Reflective Writing April 16, 2010

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Reflective Writing April 16, 2010

The experience of teaching my cohort peers a new printmaking technique was quite fulfilling during this work session at Grady High, particularly since everyone soon made use of the technique in our collaborative art project. Our image-making session followed a presentation by a visiting APAL artist. The subject matter for our joint artwork was to be influenced by Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind”. The technique I shared was a solvent-transfer of Xeroxed or laser-printed images. I had just learned it the same week in my printmaking class at the Chastain Art Center. It involves a relatively safe solvent paint stripper to soften the toner on black-and-white or color copies made on a standard copier or laser printer. The key is to have an image printed with a plastic-based toner or color ink—not an ink-jet printed image, nor one from a magazine that is printed on coated paper. The Citrustrip Gel product is available for about $12 per quart, and should be enough for hundreds of transfer prints. I would recommend using it with gloves, taking care to not get it on exposed skin. Although the solvent is much safer than others used for this process such as MEK or Wintergreen oil, adequate ventilation still should be provided. Applied liberally to the back of the intended image, black-and-white and color images transfer well if the toner is well heat-set by the copier that produced them. Note that you need to wait several minutes for the solvent to penetrate the paper when the stripper is applied to the back of the image. I recommend lightly taping the image down so it does not shift when it is placed over the paper to which it is to be transferred. Be sure to remove the excess gel stripper that hasn’t penetrated the paper by scraping with scraps of matboard. The same gel can be reused many times to transfer images. After the gel is removed and the back of the image is covered with wax paper, you can start burnishing the image down. Moderate pressure with a burnishing object such as a wooden spoon or a smooth glass bottle is all that is needed to get a good black image; however, color Xeroxes require more pressure. This is a good time to pull out that rarely used printing press to run your paper and the original through with enough pressure to get a good color image transfer. I believe you will find the technique useful for work with students 5^th grade and up. Good Luck.