WHEN: Prior to the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Chicago
11:30 AM to 5 PM Wednesday, April 15th and 9 AM to 12 PM Thursday, April 16th
WHERE: Wed - National Louis University, in the Atrium, 122 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL Thursday – National Louis, Classrooms TBD
COST: Free! (Donations to NLU are strongly encouraged, though)
For more information and to register, contact [email protected]
Theoretical Framework Play is fun, but also very serious. In his Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2009), Stuart Brown documents the neurological and ethological research showing how play is the central complex of behaviors evolutionarily developed to facilitate learning and social bonding among mammals. Social imagination is facilitated through members’ innovative, sportive, artful participation within loosely rule-governed frameworks lying comfortably between the extremes of total anarchy and total standardization.
Several of the contributions to the recent collection Education and Hope in Troubled Times (Shapiro, ed. 2009) relate how effectually transformative social imagination is sparked by the cultivation of free play: including Miller’s “Education After the Empire,” Eisler’s “Education for a Partnership World,” Sapon-Shevin’s “To Touch and Be Touched,” Shapiro’s “Worlds of Change,” Roskelly’s “Teaching Like Weasels,” Keating’s “Transforming Status Quo Stories,” and Westheimer’s “No Child Left Thinking.” These authors echo arguments made long ago by the poet Schiller in the classic Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind, written during the original Age of Terror: “it is only through engagement in free play that we arrive at genuinely free politics.”
Rationale If the cultivation of imaginative play is central to the cultivation of social imagination, the skills of play need to be deliberately and publicly cultivated. Members of the Holistic Education SIG often lament our inability to embody the depth of our teaching practices at AERA, or to form among ourselves the kinds of rich community we regularly form with our students. AERA has represented, for many of us, a place where deeply kindred spirits can come—because of the heavily presentational format and limited time frame of the sessions—into only superficial connection.
We therefore are hosting a Playshop over a day and a half before AERA, enabling our members—as well as those of other like-minded groups—to connect more fully with one another through participating in the kinds of activities that for the most part can only be reported on during the actual conference. The Playshop is an exceptional opportunity for: inspiring practicing researchers and educators in the field; mentoring graduate students and junior researchers in the essential skill of living our theories and practices, of “being the change we want to see in the world” as Gandhi famously put it; introducing those from diverse fields to our research methods through the embodied experience of those methods; and, not least, for refreshing body/mind/ spirit stimulation to energize us through the course of the long, heady conference to follow. In short, this is a holistic program of holistic activities for holistic professionals to acquire the skills of holistically, vitally inhabiting and enriching the social world, through our engaging in holistic action research with one another.
Goals The time is structured to facilitate the acquisition of a series of holistic skills on the following themes: embodiment, presence, altruism, the outing and acknowledgement of oppression, and the distilling of wisdom in teachers’ lives. Participants will throughout engage in and reflect on the effectiveness of holistic qualitative action research methodologies: including narrative inquiry, drama inquiry, arts-based research, psychological self-study, and philosophical methods anchored in the quest for personal and collective wisdom.
Most important, ample time is allowed for free dialogue, as well as more structured community building activities incorporated into the instructional activities. Our most important goal is the building of life-sustaining and life-renewing social imagination among ourselves, in the form of a community of educators/researchers helping to form a Special Interest Group who take the word “interest” seriously, as “Inter-Being”: the sense Dewey gave to the word in his first important educational essay, “Interest and the Training of the Will” (1895), echoed in our own times by Buddhist activist Thick Naht Hahn in the book Inter-Being (1987). This session, we believe, presents a particularly apt form of professional development.