Here’s a piece I wrote this summer after spending some time reflecting on our incredible closing week last June. I understand that this will be edited and then will appear in this winter’s Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice. (Some names have been changed, to protect the innocent!) Cute photos to follow!- Paul
If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try;
If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start at once to die.
-W.H. Auden (Csíkszentmihályi, 1997, 2)
Not to be overly melodramatic, but simply put, this is a question of life or death. When we educate children primarily to receive input, when we value their stillness, their passivity, their compliance and their ability to regurgitate ingested facts, skills and behaviors without original thought, we are educating for death. Death’s critical attributes include that it is without motion. It is cold, predictable, without spontaneity, emotion, passion, relationship or community. The critical attributes of life then are the antitheses. Education for life must be a dynamic process. It must involve an in-and-out movement, what some holistic educators refer to as a breathing rhythm. It must be fluid and active. It is warm rather than cool. It involves interaction, relationship, emotion, inspiration, complexity, community and importantly creativity and self-expression. How can we educate for life?
Recently, as the school year came to an end, my class of 17 six to ten year olds enjoyed a not-too-rare but blessed period of time where something apparently went right. In a rather remarkable sequence of seemingly unrelated individual moments, I was privileged to witness a number of kids taking chances, becoming deeply absorbed in their work and creatively expressing some kind of inner growth in a wide variety of ways. Over a period of a week or two, Heather danced with previously undiscovered expression, beauty and grace, Sasha suddenly experienced newfound eloquence as he expressed himself through poetry; Justin demonstrated exceptional creativity through his play on the field. And many more examples of creativity abounded. What was going on here? I found myself wondering about these clear signs of life, where had they come from, why had they not been more evident at other times? And in the days and weeks that have followed I have been immersed in reflection and study. Have other authors and educators written about these occasional floods of creative expressions? What is the meaning of such outpourings of creativity? Should this be the real goal of education? What would that shift in focus mean for the educational mission as well as methods? Is it possible to create optimal conditions that will increase the likelihood of such creative expressions?
Before beginning, let’s be clear, it is not my opinion that education should be entirely about expression, unbridled individual emoting and creating. I am not seeking paroxysmal expulsions of the learners’ inner worlds. Rather it is my hope to restore balance to the educational mission. The pendulum has swung way too far toward valuing the receiving of information, and assessing learners’ success based upon impression and mimicry. I aim to return a much needed and often absent prizing of expression and creativity, integrating and applying learned concepts to meaningful creative projects. What Benjamin Bloom called the higher levels of thinking, including invention, design, composition and synthesis.
The Language of Dance
Here’s one example: Heather is a reserved, watchful 1st grader. She is one of the youngest in a multi-age class. Among the many elements of her school work this year she has learned the vocabulary and elements of dance. She has learned to move at different levels, at different paces and with fluidity as well as rigidity. She has quietly participated in all elements of her dance class but always with a careful self-conscious tentativeness. She is very aware of the movements and modeling of other group members and watches everything with her big brown eyes.
One element that the class had wanted to include in our year-end closing celebration was a series of individual dance solos for the parent audience. For some children this was a scary prospect to be avoided at all costs. For others it was a chance to shine in the spotlight. Despite several rehearsals, as our closing day approached I wasn’t sure who would actually choose to dance in front of this large gathering of parents and friends. When it was Heather’s turn, she hesitantly took the floor, closed her eyes and then what poured out of her small frame was a thing of pure magic. She turned her gaze inward and then moved to the music with a rhythm and grace that I had not seen from her before. She expressed a huge range of emotions with sophistication and poise. She lunged, reached, withdrew, stretched, collapsed and leapt. For about three minutes she was obviously somewhere else, totally immersed in self-expression but in a way that was mindful and integral. All she had learned and internalized was synthesized and reconfigured into a unique original, spontaneous yet intentional composition. I was blown away. What a privilege to be present for such a special moment in a young person’s life.
While the arts are continually marginalized in mainstream education making way for the emphasis on the more dominant and acceptable modes of communication, there are pedagogies that value the many forms of creative expression inherent in children. The Reggio Emelia approach to education is one example of a model that grows out of a core set of beliefs that include an understanding of learning as an active and creative venture. Out of this tradition, Loris Malaguzzi famously wrote about the “hundred languages of children.” (Edwards, 1998) Malaguzzi suggests that children come to us with countless ways of expressing themselves. Formal education too often equates to a process of whittling away at nearly all of these “languages” and reinforcing the one or two acceptable methods and techniques of expression that are valued by the mainstream educational institution.
One of children’s innate languages is that of dance, in its many forms. Physical movement to a rhythm has been a means of expression in virtually every human culture. Why have we decided that it is not a valuable means of expression? Is it simply because it can’t be easily scored and assessed by a multiple-choice test? Ken Robinson in his advocacy for creativity in school has written about the arbitrary discrimination against dance: “I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to. What happens is that as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. Then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.” (Robinson, 2006)
Poetry
Sasha is an extremely verbal 8 year old in our class. In an end-of-the-year writing assignment a peer wrote of Sasha, “Sasha is like a rooster. He is proud, colorful and not subtle with his voice.” But one area in which Sasha struggles a bit is his writing. The mechanics of writing are challenging for him. The fine motor skills, precision and concentration required to form letters in a standard size and shape is frustrating. As a result, Sasha has shied away from many writing challenges. Lately, with a lot of encouragement and support, he has begun to enjoy the writing process more. He has in fact moved towards a personal style of long narratives infused with plenty of absurd humor. I see this shift as a sign of progress for sure, but still his writing has lacked form, care or precision.
As the year came towards its close, we went outside into the beautiful natural setting of our schoolyard. We talked about the five (or six) senses and shared lots of poetry to inspire each of us. Then with clipboards in hand, each student found something that represented an aspect of beauty to him or her. And the students were simply given as much time and space as they needed.
Sasha returned to class with this gem:
As green as grass
The twig sits on the branch
Gentle leaves waving in the wind
As a gentle breeze ruffles my hair
A spider silently weaves a web
As the fantastic earth sings
It may not be obvious in this context, but for Sasha, these six simple lines represent a huge transformative and developmental leap in his written expression. Without prompting he has paid attention to and integrated previous lessons in rhythm, alliteration, similes and imagery. Once again, during the quietude of this setting, this learner went somewhere else. He became immersed in a moment of beauty and contemplation and used this opportunity to break through his many obstacles, become fully present, integrate his learning and shape it into a composition that was entirely his own. Where did he go? How can we facilitate this journey for all learners?
Flow and Peak Experiences
Recently, a handful of authors, notably Ken Robinson, mentioned earlier, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, have begun to closely examine the creative process. Robinson talks and writes passionately about the need in the contemporary world for creative outside-the-box thinkers and the need for schools to foster creativity as a central part of the educational mission.
Csíkszentmihályi has written at length about the concept of “flow.” (Csíkszentmihályi, 2008) Flow refers to moments of extremely heightened creativity where individuals become so thoroughly engaged in the process of creating that other perceptions are altered and the individual approaches a state of complete presence. Ultimately, I believe that proponents of integral or holistic education are striving to design educational approaches that reach toward facilitating such experiences.
Csíkszentmihályi has suggested that the conditions that are necessary to achieve flow include the right blend of two factors, the task’s level of challenge, on the one hand, and the individual’s level of skill on the other. If both challenge and skill are high, flow is a much more likely outcome. A bit lower skill level and the individual might experience “arousal,” but not flow. A bit less challenge, may lead simply to a sense of “control.” But if the challenge is too far out of balance with skills, the results could be the polar opposites of either “worry” and “anxiety” (high challenge, with low skill level) or “relaxation” and “boredom” (low challenge with high skills.) Neither polarity is at all conducive to creating flow. If both the task is too devoid of challenge and the learner simultaneously lacks necessary skill the result is what Csíkszentmihályi calls “apathy”- the condition furthest from “flow” in his spectrum, and the antithesis of engaged learning. (Csíkszentmihályi, 1997) Apathy is the nemesis of the holistic educator and what seems to be so tragically omnipresent in mainstream education today.
So achieving flow requires a high level of challenge combined with high levels of skill. I would add that in a school classroom, realizing flow requires a high degree of differentiated, artful and engaged teaching on the part of the educator. It is rarely the case that two learners possess identical skill or require identical challenge to achieve flow. It therefore requires a very special teacher, one who pays great attention to the needs, learning styles, interests, preferred modalities and developmental levels of each child. It requires that the teacher knows each learner intimately. It also requires a large amount of flexibility and willingness to adapt and modify lessons to meet the needs of individual learners. Not an easy dance.
In the second half of the 20th century humanistic psychologists including Abraham Maslow wrote about a phenomenon quite similar to Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow, which Maslow called the “peak experience.” The peak experience is “what you feel and perhaps ‘know’ when you gain authentic elevation as a human being.” (Geiger, 1993, xvi-xvii). Maslow claimed that the peak experience was a “climax moment” for a “self actualized” person. That is someone well on the path to fulfilling his/her ultimate potential as a fully human person. I can’t claim anything quite so grand in my observations of children in my classroom, but perhaps just as learners gain proficiency in any new skill by making a series of small approximations towards the goal, these children’s creative expressions when the learner seems fully engaged and lost in the creative process are little practice steps on the path towards “self actualization.” Perhaps this was what motivated Maslow to write so passionately about arts and creativity in education,
“…the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing. Another conclusion I seem to be impelled toward, is that creative art education, or better said, Education-Through-Art, may be especially important not so much for turning out artists or art products, as for turning out better people. (Maslow, 1993, 55)
And Maslow was not alone in identifying the goal of self-actualization. Educational scholar Scott Forbes analyzed the historical landscape of holistic education in great depth. (Forbes) Forbes uses the term “ultimacy,” which he attributes to Paul Tillich, to characterize what all holistic educators strive for. That is “The highest state of being that a human can aspire to.” (Forbes, 1993, 17) From Rousseau, through Pestalozzi, Froebel and Jung have identified a similar concept as the goal of education. And again, I suggest that peak experiences and moments of flow are small steps along the path towards this lofty goal of ultimacy.
Flow at Recess
Though often ignored for any pedagogical potential or significance, recess can be a venue for extraordinary creativity, flow and peak experiences. In the typical elementary school, the kids are deposited outside for recess twice a day to let off steam, use their “outside voices” and release their pent up physical energies. Often two or three yard supervisors, armed with whistles, clipboards and first aid supplies patrol the open yard somehow monitoring a couple of hundred kids. The educational goal seems simply to be to hang on and keep everyone safe until the bell rings. At that point, children line up, are met by their freshly re-caffeinated teacher, and are herded back into the classroom for more “real learning.” Recess is seen as a largely valueless time other than as a break between lessons. In my experience, however, it is at recess that so much “real learning” and growth takes place. Maybe because of the somewhat wider boundaries, it is a time when creativity can flourish in particular. It is unfortunate that more teachers don’t have a chance to join the kids in unbounded play and witness the occasional moments of flow.
During the last weeks of my school year, as soccer’s World Cup approached, many of the kids showed a renewed interest in this sport. So at recess, we set up games. Several kids chose favorite players to emulate and invented team names, chants and songs to cheer one another on to victory. In these games, however, one slightly built red-haired nine year-old boy emerged as a unique voice and vision on the field. For Justin, it was all about the creative process. Doing something that hadn’t been done before, or that no one expected him to do. “The score doesn’t matter!” He shouted over and over when peers would become mired in arguments about points and press for a win. He embodied what soccer players and analysts talk about when they describe the “creativity” of soccer greats. Justin would take the ball down field and try a step-over move that would leave a defender behind. He would smile gleefully as he made a successful pass to a teammate even as the teammate misplayed the ball and gave it right back to an opposing player. He was determined, focused but absolutely and remarkably good spirited during his play. He seemed to genuinely wish everyone well on both teams, even as he himself competed fiercely. Everyone seemed inspired by his play. Everyone wanted to be on his team, although he was clearly not the best athlete on the field, but all wanted to catch a bit of his “magic.” A spontaneous cheering section emerged on the sidelines, who shouted his name and yelled “olé” each time he touched the ball. Although it is rarely recognized as such, by playing soccer, Justin was expressing himself in one of his “hundred languages.” And the “flow” he achieved in this self-expression was impossible to miss.
Here was one example of a case when moments of creative flow at school do not happen only when students are working in relative seclusion or stillness. Flow can come out of collaboration as well. In fact, I’d suggest that perhaps the very purpose of school is to create small communities that can facilitate growth and development as is evidenced by moments of heightened creativity. Another prerequisite then, for facilitating flow in the classroom that I would add to Csíkszentmihályi’s balance of skill and challenge is maintaining a supportive learning community. Community is the envelope within which creative risks may be taken. The creating and sustaining of a community that both values and respects diverse points of view and ways of being is critical. Even a well designed activity with a high level of challenge approached by highly skilled individuals can fall flat if it does not occur within a supportive community. Creating such a community, where learners push one another to reach further, yet simultaneously treat one another with unconditional care is a complex process, certainly the subject of much research and study in its own right. Making efforts towards creating such a community, what Parker Palmer calls a “community of truth” (Palmer, 1998, 101) is energy very well spent.
In addition to, and complimenting, the right blend of skill and challenge, Palmer further identifies several other critical tensions elements that must be carefully balanced in the classroom environment. He describes the need to create a learning environment that is both “safe and charged.” The learners need to experience the energizing force of facing difficult tasks, yet they must also know they will be accepted no matter the outcome. Palmer also identifies the need for space that is both “open and bounded.” (Palmer, 1998, 74) In general I think schools are very good at binding space. Both physical space and time are meticulously controlled. We need to do a much better job, however, at holding space open to allow room for exploration and creativity to emerge. I think many of the moments of flow my class experienced in the last weeks of school were partly a function of a relaxation of the usual boundaries.
Reaching for exceptional creativity as a regular part of a classroom culture also requires one additional element to be present. Students need to see models of teachers and mentors who are, themselves, highly engaged and passionately creative people. Learning in the presence of such inspiration exponentially increases the likelihood of achieving flow. In the presence of an engaged mentor, creativity, engagement and pursuing one’s passions enter the students’ vocabulary and become part of the culture of the learning environment. Our school is blessed with several such teachers and they continually make it seem possible and reasonable to love what you do and lose yourself in your own creativity.
Getting flowing
There are many impediments to nurturing flow in the traditional school environment that the classroom teacher must overcome. Woven into the fabric of school life are elements such as bounded physical space, which require students to live the vast majority of their educational lives within the four walls of the classroom while seated at their desks. The bell rings in 45-minute intervals to indicate the end of one type of learning and the beginning of another. The ratio of students to teachers is often far too large to allow for any real sense of intimacy between teacher and student. The escalating intensity of high stakes testing, a prevailing atmosphere of competition, and a curriculum increasingly defined by state and national standards tends to encourage teachers to severely limit and narrow students’ ability to make meaningful choices about their own learning. Individual students are not seen as unique in any real sense, and any perceived difference poses a challenge to the teacher and a threat to the order of the classroom. Out of necessity, teachers also tend to limit students’ opportunities to apply their learning, integrate different areas of learning, and to be creative in the broadest sense. In general, students are not expected to (or in some tragic cases are not allowed to (Olson, 2009)) compose and express new ideas or ways of seeing that have yet to be articulated by other “experts.” Educational activists and visionaries must work to design whole educational systems and settings where we can transcend many of these traditional habitual impediments.
In the last weeks of my school year a number of factors came serendipitously together. My class had spent a lot of the year building a supportive community where individuality and difference are celebrated. We had the good fortune to have a number of teachers and mentors who modeled engagement and the creative process. And then, we shared a heightened sense of both tension and safety, challenge and skill as we built towards and practiced what were to be our several closing rituals. Finally, we enjoyed a loosening of our usual boundaries and time constraints as the familiar routine was modified to prepare for our closing. While I don’t know precisely what combination of factors contributed to this wonderful period of time, I suspect it may be this “letting go of the reins” that was a key factor for us.
Moments of flow and peak experiences represent the creative outpouring of a dynamic in and out process. These transcendent encounters, when students are fully engaged and lose themselves in their own creativity can be useful barometers to measure whether or not a classroom is educating for life. A traditional model of a successful classroom, where learners are compliant, docile, and recall facts and can perform learned skills with precision does not define the target for educators interested in educating for life. Let us instead reflect on what is needed in each particular learning environment to allow learners’ creative juices to flow freely and abundantly. Let us reach towards ultimacy and educating for life.
References
Csíkszentmihályi, M. 1997 Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Csíkszentmihályi, M. 2008 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Edwards, C (ed.) et al. 1998. The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach-Advanced Reflections. Maryland Heights, MO: Elsevier Science.
Forbes, S. 1993. Holistic Education: An Analysis of Its Ideas and Nature. Brandon, VT: Foundation for Educational Renewal.
Geiger, H. 1993. Introduction in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. (A. Maslow, Ed.) Arkana: Harmondsworth.
Maslow, A. (ed.) 1993. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Arkana: Harmondsworth.
Olson, K. 2009. Wounded by School:Recapturing the Joy In Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture. New York: Teachers College Press.
Palmer, P. 1998. The Courage To Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Josey-Bass.
Robinson, K. October 2006. Take the Chance, Let Them Dance in Edutopia Magazine. http://www.edutopia.org/magazine/oct06.
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