Aesthetic Space

The Magic of Odd Numbered-Groups (As Opposed to Even-Numbered)

Last week I was interviewed about Getting Messy by Jefferson Public Radio in Southern Oregon. (You can listen to the interview by clicking ""Press & Media" on my blog OR by going to JPR's website.)

The interview was an hour-long, and the listeners who called in had all kinds of interesting things to say about teaching and learning. Perhaps the most intriguing was one man who spoke of how "three" or "five" is a magic number in group situations. He said that when there are three people or five people, the group can come to a decision more quickly than if there are an even number of participants. His comment reminded me of the work I've been doing recently on "bridging polarities." Teaching and learning are polarities, and Getting Messy is about bridging the teaching-and-learning polarity (finding our way to "third space" where we are both teachers and learners). But when groups come together, there are also many other potential polarities that might be present (men/women, young/old, conservative/liberal to name a few). What happens when you have three people, five people, seven people, and so on, is that you have a "mid-point." An even number of people (metaphorically speaking anyway), suggests that the group could split evenly into two opposing camps.

In any case, I send a big thank you out to Jefferson Public Radio and their listening audience. It was great fun (and a little messy!)

Learning is a Conversation - Excerpt from Getting Messy

In the 1920s, Lincoln Steffans was a history student at the University of California Berkeley. As a freshman, he became engrossed in history and read everything he could find on the subject. It soon became clear to him, however, that these scholars of history did not agree. He discovered that history was not a set of facts set in stone. Rather, history was an ongoing conversation, a conversation in which he himself, as an undergraduate, could participate. He wrote,

What I had was a quickening sense that...every chapter of [history], from the beginning of the world to the end, is crying out to be rewritten. There was something for Youth to do...Maybe these professors, whom I greatly respected, did not know it all. I read these books over again with a fresh eye, with a real interest, and I could see that, as in history, so in other branches of knowledge, everything was in the air. (quote found in Danielle Lafrance’s Berkeley! A Literary Tribute.)

We can only really know something by forming our own relationship with it. You can read a book on a particular topic and pick up various pieces of information, but the material will not come alive for you unless you develop a personal relationship with it—a relationship that inspires your own questions and responses. This is when learning becomes expansive. We don’t know what this relationship is going to hold for us and we don’t know how it’s going to shift and change over time. In the process of developing this connection, we uncover our values and beliefs, which in turn shape our perceptions and subsequent learning. We also discover this particular topic’s questions and areas of debate, footholds where we are most likely to want to participate in the conversation.

In I and Thou, Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting” and that is true when we learn. Learning happens when we form a relationship with the thing we are seeking to understand. In Buber’s words, we cannot “have” the ocean, we cannot have any thing—but we can engage in relationships in this world. We can enter into a closeness with other people and with things, and this relationship with “other” is what is transformative. There is a sacredness in this relationship, in this “space between” us and our subject.

What is required when we teach in dynamic, continually-changing environments, environments where we are working entirely with the mystery of human nature?

My approach is to be a learner, and just as Lincoln Steffans discovered in the example above, learning is a conversation. Learning happens when we move out of our individual bubbles to participate and interact with something outside of ourselves. Then we step back “in” to reflect on our experience. Breathing occurs in the same manner: in-breath, out-breath, in-breath, out-breath. As we move forward, taking steps out and in, we begin to develop our own relationship with the topic. In this book, we are exploring what it means to be teachers and learners—in both cases, we ask questions, test them in action, and then go back in to reflect on what has occurred. In-breath, out-breath, in-breath.

The educator and philosopher John Dewey wrote that learning is a venture into the unknown that always involves risk. It requires courage, vulnerability, a degree of humility, and the willingness to be present to the unfolding. We may not know how to respond to some particular thing, but we are willing to learn.

Excerpted from Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches and Mentors © Rawberry Books Publisher. For more information, go to the book page of this blog.

Happy holidays everyone!

Tweet

Being Headless

When I teach, I work with something I call "third space." Third space is that creative place of openness, when new possibilities have space to come in. But in order to get to third space, I have to take off the “expert” cap and simply be present and open to what wants to happen. When I try to control or "be the expert," I lose third space. What happens when we exert our authority, either through maintaining strict control, or being the only one in the room who knows anything, is that we create a polarized situation—-us against the students.

We will not reach third space when there’s a strong polarity--meaning the teacher/leader/instructor is heavily invested in either their own expertise or maintaining control and authority. No matter how much of an expert we are, we need to be "learners" when we teach--holding what we know in one hand, holding the other hand empty. You could call this being "headless." If you can’t do your work when you’re headless, it’s probably not your right work.

At the time I wrote Getting Messy, my experience creating third space in group settings was new and experimental, but since that time I have come across Adolg Guggenbuhl’s wonderful book Power in the Helping Professions, in which he discusses something very similar. Guggenbuhl, a Jungian psychiatrist, does not use the term “third space,” but he does detail how those in the helping profession create polarities with clients, students, the elderly, and so on when they take the role of “knower.” He calls the polarization a “split archetype.” In Guggenbuhl’s view, as soon as we know what’s best for our patient (or mother, father, student, friend, lover), we have split the archetype. One of us is all-knowing and all-powerful, and the other is ignorant, neurotic and powerless. In such a situation, no healing or creativity has the space to occur, because the interaction is now about the polarity. Emilie Conrad, the founder of a bodywork method called Continuum calls this model the dominator model: “I will do this to you.” Unfortunately, in educational settings, the dominator model is what is typically expected. But the dominator model can happen in any situation in which a power imbalance exists--health care, government, and so forth...

Teaching as Creative Process

The creative process is how we engage with life, and all of us engage with life in a variety of ways. Teaching has been my creative passion because it seems to me to be the ultimate “meeting of life.” When we work with a new group, we have no idea who is going to show up or what challenges (or gifts) lie before us. Jacob Needleman, one of my favorite authors, says that a sense of meaning is more important than anything else in life. Without meaning, we are in despair. He writes, “We’re built to serve something greater than ourselves.”

Getting Messy is a book about the beauty and richness of teaching. Here’s an excerpt from the Conclusion:

A friend who loves metaphors asked me what metaphor came to my mind for this book. My subconscious mind immediately gave me a very clear image, but I didn’t want to share it, because my image was the mushroom cloud after the atomic bomb was dropped. (That certainly was messy.)

My subconscious had been influenced by a play I saw recently about the science that led up to the bomb. What I remember from watching the play is that two different substances collide which results in the splitting of atoms, and the splitting of atoms creates an enormous amount of energy. Finding myself curious, I looked it up on wikipedia.org:

“In 1898, French physicist Pierre Curie and his Polish wife Maria Sklodowska-Curie had discovered that present in pitchblende, an ore of uranium, was a substance which emitted large amounts of radioactivity, which they named radium. This raised the hopes of both scientists and lay people that the elements around us could contain tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped.”

There is something about the line “containing tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped” that has to do with why this particular image came up for me. Getting Messy is about learning, creativity, imagination, and traversing into unknown space. It presents a higher vision of teaching and learning, a vision that bridges two well-established polarities: learner-expert and learning process- creative process. When we bridge these polarities, we create third space—imaginal space. Like the radium discovered by Pierre and Maria Curie, imaginal space is already present in our everyday lives. It is unseen energy waiting to be tapped. I believe it’s time for us to tap it.

*

Note: The quilt at the top of this post was made by Essie Bendolph Pettway. See more Gee's Bend quilts at http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/index.htm

Getting Messy Facebook Page!

Please check out my new facebook page for Getting Messy:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Getting-Messy-Taking-Risks-and-Opening-the-Imagination/201587503232115

Hope you're all having a wonderful summer. I just finished reading Adolf Guggenbuhl's book, Power in the helping professions. My favorite quote was written by John Haule in the preface:

“As soon as we know ‘what’s best’ for our patient or student—we have in Guggenbuhl’s language ‘split the archetype.’ One of us is all-knowing and all-powerful, and the other is ignorant, neurotic and powerless.”

To Know a Thing is to Awaken to its Depth

Thomas Aquinas once wrote that "To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence." According to Aquinas, each thing (and each of us as well) secretly and profoundly "desires to be known." My passion has always been teaching and learning, and in Aquinas' remarks we see how central beauty is when we teach and learn. Beauty is the depth at which we see something, meaning that we aren't seeing the person/student/client through an old, cloudy "image" of who we think they are. As the philosopher Simone Weil said, paying attention to another is an act of love.

Sort of like watching a flower blossom.

Drawing on the Larger Wisdom

I finished teaching my last Psychology of Transformative Learning class yesterday. The title of the course felt daunting to me (I didn't come up with that title, the class I suggested would have been called "Imaginal Ways of Knowing" or "Psychology of Perceiving and Knowing"), but I did what I always do--I taught it from "third space." I knew that it wasn't me who was teaching this class. The subject itself (transformative learning) was teaching it, and I was there to learn about transformative learning along with my students. I didn't need to fret about the material, because the right material would show up.

Third space is similar in some respects to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious and psychologists often refer to third space as “liminal” space. Theologians define it as a “Divine Third” and Martin Buber called it “Thou.” One might also call it the imagination. Our traditional institutions—religion, psychology, medicine, education—have removed the liminal layer from their practices. If something can’t be measured or seen clearly, it is presumed to not exist. Third space is where we find inspiration, creative renewal, and meaning.

Third space is that place of expanded knowing and intuitive wisdom; it's the great unknown of inspiration and possibility. We could define it as our creative process, or as a realm that is just beyond our ordinary, every day rational intellectual capacities. When groups of two or more come together in meaningful ways for a shared purpose, there is a larger wisdom available to draw upon, a wisdom that lies within the center of the group itself. Teaching from that place keeps me inspired and renewed. It ended up being a great class!

Life Is Calling All Of Us To Be Teachers

Almost two years ago I published a book on teaching, Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination. The heart of the book was to show teaching (at its best) as a creative process of learning along the way. By approaching teaching as a process of ongoing inquiry in which we are learners (along with our students), we’re able to stay renewed, recharged and inspired. Because if we can be learners when we teach, then there must be something bigger than us—what I call a “third thing”—that is actually doing the teaching. Burn-out, fear, anxiety and terror happen when the weight of the situation is all on our shoulders—when we feel we must be perfect, have all the answers, be “in control.” But when we find and access the third thing, we have space we can breathe into. We can be “headless”—operating from our hearts and the highest parts of ourselves, rather than our egos and linear minds.

Being a teacher in the traditional sense presents us with an automatic polarity doesn’t it? On one side of the polarity is the teacher, a person who is expected to have professional expertise and managerial control. On the other side of the polarity are the learners, who seemingly have come as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by our infinite wisdom. Despite the wisdom and expertise that we hold, this dichotomy of teacher-student automatically presents a friction, a tension, however we wish to soothe it over. But when we find third space as teachers, we bridge the dichotomy between teacher and student, and the process of teaching and learning finds its highest form. Beauty, grace, and inspiration are now present in the room. We are participating in the mystery. After all, it does say somewhere in the Bible that when “two or more are present, there I am in your midst.” I don’t consider myself to be a religious person, but I have always taught with this in mind. There is a third thing that is present when I teach, and that third thing is where the beauty of teaching and learning lie.

Recently Jennifer Louden and her colleague Michele Christensen hosted an on-line program called Teach Now. I admire Jennifer Louden. She has an ability to speak and present information simply, elegantly and powerfully, and their program appears to have been wildly popular. While the word teacher, for most people, typically evokes the image of a kindergarten or high school teacher, Jennifer Louden and Michele Christensen describe those who are called to teach as members of “a tribe” who want to share ideas, energy, information with others for the sake of serving. Jennifer writes: “Life is calling many of us to be teachers, to share what we have learned and are learning.”

I love what Jennifer and Michele did in their Teach Now program, and I hope that Getting Messy will be a helpful support to those who are called to teach. It can be purchased on Amazon by clicking here, as well as several local bookstores in the Bay area (see the list on the right-hand column of this blog). And you can find out more about Teach Now here: http://jenniferlouden.com/teach-now/

Creating Third Space When You Teach, Train, Coach or Mentor

I'm getting ready to fly to the midwest to do a workshop and book event in my hometown. In honor of the occasion, I'm going to share a few words on "third space" in the teaching, training, coaching and mentoring relationship. (You can read more in chapter 6 of Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination, available at most on-line retailers!).)

Third Space is one of the things that I find most captivating about teaching, or any other situation where a group of people come together for an intentional purpose. The philosopher Hannah Arendt called this space "an in-between," theologians define it as a "Divine Third," and Martin Buber called it "Thou." When we form a relationship with something that we care about, that thing is no longer an "It." There is a depth that is present, a sense of mystery. We are in relation with something that is "other" and it's clear that we don't have all the answers, we can't figure this out ahead of time. All we can do is put whatever we have to say out there, see what comes back, and use feedback to alter course. Working with other people in this way is a deeply creative process. (And this concept doesn't just apply to teaching or mentoring, think of relationships with your children or anyone else, for that matter.)

To honor the wisdom that is available in this third space we need to focus on creating space when we teach, train, coach or mentor. This is often hard to do because it's counter-intuitive. When we are in a situation of teaching or leading others, it's common to presume that our job is to "fill" the space with our agenda, information, and so on. But to honor the deeper wisdom that is present in the group or between individuals, we must focus on creating and holding that larger group space. The agenda is always secondary in importance to the space we create.

Here are some other ideas (in no particular order) for inviting third space. They seem quite simple, and I think perhaps that’s the point...

1) Create a space for yourself to be inspired. Teaching is a creative process and in order to access third space, you need to be in your own creative flow. Go somewhere where you feel expansive, somewhere you can look out on a vista—climb a mountain, hike along ocean cliffs, and so on. Stay until you feel your heart open and can breathe this expansiveness back with you. In order to inspire others, you have to stay inspired yourself. It’s a process—you may lose it for awhile, it may shift, it may be buried under your fear, and if you’ve taught something several times, you may have to work a little harder to find it. But in order to touch others, you need to be present with what it is that moves your own heart.

2) Be more interested in what the people in your group have to say than in what you have to say. Even if you’re teaching something heavily content-oriented, like how to read CT scans in a Radiology department, your students have questions, concerns, and points of interest. These questions, concerns, and points of interest are important. What you have to say is not so important. Take yourself and your own opinions, thoughts, and beliefs out of the group. If you have something you really want them to know, hand it out as written material for them to read. Your job is to facilitate what wants to happen, which doesn’t have anything to do with you personally. In order to get to third space, you need to drop not only your ego, but all of your ideas, expectations and attitudes, and teach from a place of emptiness. The English philosopher Douglas Harding calls it being “headless.” Check out his website at www.headless.org. A friend of mine believes that if you can't do your work when you're headless, then it's not your real work.

3) Have a sturdy structure that gives each person equal time to share. This may seem obvious, but I believe great teachers are really sensitive about this issue and some people are more sensitive than others. There are people in your group who are shy and need encouragement and if you structure the group in such a way that they have space to share, it’s amazing how frequently they will offer the situation something brilliant, something that shifts the entire group in a deeper, richer direction. Of course, don’t push people to share if they don’t want to. Rather, have a structure that naturally gives each person equal time. It’s not true that the people who appear to have the “loudest” process need the most space inside the group. There’s a fascinating article that Jo Freeman wrote back in the 1970s titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman describes in detail how in groups that don’t have proper structure, the people who are more dominant (more educated, more assertive, more well-spoken, more extraverted, and so on…) will move in to “take up” the group space. Don’t let this happen. You will definitely transform the group process if you just follow this simple principle. Alan Briskin gives a great example in his book, The Power of Collective Wisdom. In his example, it is 1966 and Cesar Chavez is holding a large community meeting with the goal of figuring out a way to reach the workers at a farm labor camp where his fledgling United Farm Workers have been barred from entering. The meeting was almost over when an old woman in the back of the room finally stands and timidly says that she knows she is “not qualified” to speak, but she has a little idea to share. This woman’s idea was what they had been waiting for.

Teaching is a great paradox. We’ve been trained to think that it’s about “leading” others, or filling up people’s heads with what we know. A friend and I often joke about how it often seems like we haven’t done anything at all. He’ll say to me, “Sometimes after a particularly amazing group, they’ll thank each other, but not me.” John Heider wrote this about group facilitators in his book The Tao of Leadership: “...their leadership did not rest on technique or theatrics, but on silence and on their ability to pay attention...They were considerate. They did no injury. They were courteous and quiet, like guests.” To reach third space, we need to remember we are guests in this experience, along with our students. What an honor.

I hope to see some of you in Dubuque on March 10th! I'll post the actual event link as soon as it's up.

Psychology of Creativity Course Syllabus

Hi folks. I've been getting so many hits for this post that I've decided to offer it as an itunes course. If you are interested in the material for the Psychology of Creativity course, please let me know by sending me an email. (You can click on "Receive Event Announcements" on the left side of this page.) Thanks for your interest!

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.

What is Aesthetic Space…. (and Why on Earth is it Important)?

Philosophers throughout history have asserted that “the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic” (Alfred North Whitehead, Gregory Bateson, James Hillman, Martin Foss, Donald Winnicott to name a few.) The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word “aisthenesthai” which is the ability to perceive. James Hillman writes, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.” Hillman often quotes an ancient philosopher named Marsilio Ficino who said that the world is an animal (meaning the world is alive and speaking to us.) The world shows itself to us as a living being; each thing has a face and calls for our attention. Our response to this call is aesthetics. Hence the word “aesthetic space,” because it’s only when we make space for beauty, that beauty presents itself to us. We pause, take a moment to notice and appreciate the particulars of some thing, and enter aesthetic space.

I recently published Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination. Much of the impulse for the book stemmed from my sorrow and despair at spending so many years in dry, joyless educational settings and a strong desire to reframe the experience of teaching and learning. Teaching and learning are beautiful, life-giving, creative processes. To teach, or to learn, requires courage, an open heart, and the willingness to be vulnerable. But instead of noticing, appreciating and honoring this inherent beauty and vulnerability, our focus is on achieving goals, setting our attention on some abstract thing in the future; something that is outside of the beauty of the present moment. The book is a call for “aesthetic space” in teaching, training, coaching and mentoring relationships.

The notion of aesthetics is closely linked to beauty, with beauty being defined not as “refinement” or “polish,” but rather, feeling the depth of something. Another way to think of beauty is feeling with our hearts. Elaine Scarry, professor at Harvard, wrote in her book On Beauty and Being Just:

* beauty attends with it a sense of abundance
* beauty makes possible a moment of largess or generosity
* beauty can usher in forgiveness
* in the presence of beauty, we have an opportunity to heal

In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce wrote that beauty is “the communication of the hidden power behind the world, shining through some physical form.”

When we teach, train, coach, and mentor, we’re serving something beyond ourselves. If we’re aware, we can recognize beauty shining through the physical form of our clients, students, or group. Ideally, we can make space for that beauty. Paradoxically, making space for beauty greatly facilitates learning, because it fuels inspiration and passion--the desire to learn.

The writer Iris Murdoch said that beauty is anything that aligns us with unselfishness. Or to say it another way, beauty is the “process of un-selfing.” At our best, as teachers, trainers, coaches and mentors, we are serving something greater than ourselves. This is aesthetic space.

Getting Messy and Using Imagery with Groups

I was recently interviewed by the Examiner.... Here's the link:

http://www.examiner.com/x-24002-Spiritual-Guidance-Examiner~y2010m5d12-When-getting-messy-is-a-good-thing-Part-Two

In the interview I discuss imaginal space, why metaphorical images are such powerful devices for learning, and what getting messy really means. Let me know your thoughts!

Loretta Pettway, 1963