The Institute jumped into the free webinar field at the beginning of this year.

It’s much simpler than I would have thought! We give people access to an audio or video. After listening/viewing, they can join an hour-long live chat, email questions and comments, or do nothing. I’ve led the online chat twice (with other Institute faculty doing the others) and I really enjoy how much we get to know each other through the improvisational conversation we create out of questions and comments.

The May webinar is on social therapy. The material is an audio interview a Brazilian psychologist conducted with me two years ago when I was in Brazil. (It’s in English.) I trace  some of the history of social therapy. I introduce my work as a post-doctoral student in Michael Cole’s laboratory at Rockefeller University in the late 1970s and my meeting Fred Newman and founding the East Side Institute. The interview presents some of the highlights of the next 40 years of engagement and conversations with radical and critical psychologists, social constructionists, humanists, Vygotskians, Marxists, activity theorists, and the narrative therapy movement. People who’ve listened to it really like it! (I’ll be listening to it before the chat!)

If you’re interested, the interview is available at http://eastsideinstitute.org/audio_files/LHolzman%20Ricardo%20Lana.WAV at your convenience.  I’ll be leading the instant chat on Friday, May 18, 12:00 PM EST. Contact Mary Fridley at mfridley@eastsideinstitute.org for webinar registration.

If you can’t make it, you can share questions and comments at webinar@eastsideinstitute.org.

I don’t usually promote activities here but now is an exception. Recent posts on the DSM-5 and all that it reveals about the ways our culture relates to human emotionality have drawn new readers (much thanks to everyone who’s reposting!). I’ve been introduced to many others who are writing, blogging, and generally working hard to expand the dialogue and to share “best non-diagnostic practices.”

Which is why I decided to share one of the programs of my Institute—Social Therapy as Clinical Practice. They’re training weekends being held in March, May and November, 2012 in New York City. They’re open to social workers, counselors, psychologists, medical professionals, and educators who favor non-diagnostic, relational approaches to mental health.

Interested?

Social Therapy as Clinical Practice

Social therapy is the group-oriented, development-focused psychotherapy that relates to people of all ages as performers and creators of their lives. Its unique approach to emotionality as social activity places it at the cutting edge of postmodern therapeutic approaches.

Intensive training weekends are an effective way to learn this powerful approach to group therapy. Each four-day training will focus on a specific aspect of social therapeutic method introduced experientially through diverse learning activities: social therapeutic role-plays, observations of therapy groups, reflection sessions with social therapists, group supervisions, and seminars linking theory and practice.

2012 Schedule

Thursday-Sunday, March 8-11

Thursday-Sunday, May 17-20

Thursday-Sunday, November 29-December 2

Fee

$475.00 per training weekend. 20% discount on two or more.

To learn more about social therapy and/or download an application, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/ClinicalTraining.html or contact Christine LaCerva at clacerva@socialtherapygroup.com.

Want to read something first?

Psychological Investigations: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy Edited by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez  Psychological Investigations explores the nature of the social therapeutic group process, the social therapeutic relationship, and applications to health care, alternative medicine, education and youth development. The book features over 70 dialogues between Fred Newman, the creator of social therapy, and therapists-in-training, These dialogues, together with introductory overviews by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez, are a provocative invitation to both new and seasoned professionals seeking alternative modes of practice and understanding. (Brunner-Routledge, 2003)

Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth

by Fred Newman with Phyllis Goldberg

In a culture of “getting,” this is the little book that keeps on giving. The 2010 edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! has a foreword by Patch Adams (the peripatetic, clowning MD) and new introduction by Lois Holzman. Based on 25 years of clinical practice and his discovery that people can reinitiate development at any stage in life, Newman urges his readers to eschew insights, explanations or getting to the “bottom” of deep-rooted emotional problems and seek their cure in development.

 

 

 

To go a bit deeper into the underlying problems with the theory and practice of psychology that the controversy over the DSM-5 exposes, I invite you to do some philosophizing.

What assumptions must people be making— about persons; therapy, the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic discourse; illness, cure and treatment; emotions and cognition; and mind, body and brain— in order to have their relationships mediated by a manual? For decades, critical psychologists, postmodern psychologists and philosophers have been exploring this big question. Fred Newman and I included. Here’s some philosophical food for thought from two philosophers who’ve helped us develop our own non-medical model approach—social therapy—and to appreciate discursive, collaborative and social constructionist approaches that reject (to varying degrees) the authority of so-called objectivity when it comes to human life as lived.

First, from Ludwig Wittgenstein. He had a unique way of doing philosophy that exposed “the pathology” embedded in language and conceptions of language, thoughts and emotions, and wanted to cure philosophy of its “illness.” An illness stemming from how we think, especially how we think about “mental” processes and/or objects. As Wittgenstein detailed in his writings, the problem with our thinking is that we’re obsessed with finding causes, correspondences, rules, parallels, generalities, theories, interpretations, and explanations for our thoughts, words and verbal deeds. It gives us “mental cramps” and, in his often blunt way of putting things, he tells us:

There is nothing more stupid than the chatter about cause and effect in history books; nothing is more wrong-handed, more half-baked.

Next, the American philosopher John Searle. In his recent book, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Searle begins:

How, if at all, can we reconcile a certain conception of the world as described by physics, chemistry, and the other basic sciences with what we know, or think we know, about ourselves as human beings? How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality, free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, and political obligations? Though many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers do not address it directly, I believe that this is the single overriding question in contemporary philosophy.

Psychologists need to join philosophers like Searle and Wittgenstein in asking this question instead of continuing to function with conceptions and methods constructed upon a foundation of dualistic separations of objective-subjective, physical-mental and body-mind.

Ken Gergen is among the few psychologists who have done so for decades. While I could quote from any number of his books and articles, I want to get back to diagnosis. In 1995, Gergen and Fred Newman presented a paper at APA entitled, “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order” (published in Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind.). It’s a polemic against psychological dualism, a critique of dominant views of the vocabulary of mind, an exploration of the philosophical assumptions that underlie diagnosis and the DSM, and a call for the democratization of diagnosis:

Despite all our facetious observations about the more absurd characterizations in DSM-IV, it ain’t funny.  Why? Because in everyday pictorial, identity-theoretic therapy these descriptions (diagnoses) are frequently used to stigmatize, constrain, and punish those to whom they are applied.  We do not change that by any kind of analysis.  We change it only by changing the diagnostic form of alienation: opening up diagnosing to everyone, continuously, although non-referentially and non-judgmentally.  We can all perform diagnosing together.  Not to get it right.  Not to give everyone a chance to do it.  But to create/perform jointly a zone of relational development (if we may take poetic license with Vygotsky’s formulation) in which we can together create new forms of life, new meanings, new lives.”

Zdravo da Ste Weekend

December 29, 2011

I returned from Serbia a few weeks ago, energized from six very performatory days with friends old and new. Nearly every year since 1997 as winter begins I’ve made the journey to work and play with the extraordinary people of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”). They’re a group of psychologists, educators, social and youth workers who’ve created a Vygotskian-influenced approach to performance and group creativity, and take it into collective centers, schools and cultural institutions in villages, towns and cities across the country. Above all, they are developmentalists. They’ve devised elegantly simple ways to engage children, youth and adults in creating common joint activity—whether that takes a musical, artistic, poetic, dance, performance or conversational form, there is no goal external to the activity. Such a non-instrumental, tool-and-result method is dear to my heart.

So are the hundred or so people of Zdravo da Ste that I have come to know through the common joint activity we create one weekend a year. We have great love for each other as both comrades and family members can—love grown from mutual passion for a better world, fierce commitment to each other, and ever-growing understanding of and respect for each other’s uniqueness born of historical and cultural difference.

This year, we spent the weekend Vrnjacka Banja—a small town in the south known for its healing mineral waters—in workshops creating performances around the topic of identity as an individual and collective process. On Monday, workshop leaders (myself, Lina Kostarova-Unkovska, Paul Murray and Tim Prentki) brought the topic and conversation to Belgrade, as panelists hosted by psychologist Bojana Skorc at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade.

In 2009 Zdravo da Ste and publisher Dragan Stojkovic of MOSTART released the Serbian edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth (translated by Bojana and Zdravo da Ste founder psychologist Vesna Ogjenovic). Social workers, psychologists, youth workers and educators in Serbia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia have a way to be introduced to Newman, social therapeutics, the performatory approach developed and practiced at the Institute, and to Zdravo da Ste’s unique way of generating development.

While in Serbia, I also led two workshops, one in Belgrade and the other in Novi Sad, organized by 2010 graduates of the Institute’s International Class Tamara Borovica, Bojan Drmonjic, Tamara Maksic and Milovan Savic. It was fun and challenging and especially rewarding to spend several hours creating with nearly 60 new performance playmates. I hope to see many of them, along with my old Zdravo da Ste friends, in New York City in October at Performing the World 2012: Can Performance Save the World?

Regarding the topic of identity, I invited those in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Vrnjacka Banja to challenge the hold our societal identities have on us by embracing (or, at a minimum, considering) our historical “identity” as creators and transformers of how things happen to be at any given societal place and time. It’s a common joint activity the world needs very much right now.

Part of a Performance in Nov Sad

New Performers in Belgrade

Please check out the latest issue of the East Side Institute’s newsletter, Reports from the Field, for news on what our friends, colleagues and alumni are up to. You’ll hear from Annalie Pistorius and her new social therapy practice in Pretoria South Africa, the synergy between Elina Lampert-Shepel and Brazilian educators at a Vygotsky research conference, and much more.

I was delighted to come across this Amazon reader review of my book Vygotsky at Work and Play. The author is David R. Cross, Ph.D.

Thanks, David!

 A Transformative Book Reflecting on a Transformative Life, July 2, 2011

Every now and then you get lucky, and find the book that is just the book you need at that point in your career to take the next step forward. (I used “book” in this opening sentence, but the same could be said for “article” or “presentation,” but here we are concerned with books.) Lois Holzman’s Vygotsky at Work and Play is just that sort of book. Up until reading it, I had been unaware of Lois Holzman’s work, and this book is a great introduction. It is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a conceptual reflection on her several decades of good work. The book is short, well-written, and a great lead-in to the work Holzman has done, mostly in partnership with Fred Newman. Their work is both multifaceted and highly innovative, and it challenges some traditional conceptions about how science is done. Their work is multifaceted because they have made significant contributions to therapy (social therapy), schooling, out-of-school (youth) programs, and the workplace (organizations). The same conceptual principles underly all of this work, which derive mainly from Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Their work is innovative for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their methodology. Part of their innovation is their (re)conceptualization of Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development,” and another part is their emphasis on performance, both as a product and a process of development in context. This is a book worth reading.

I’m on a working vacation at the beautiful ocean community of Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. Today, after the preparations for and actuality of Hurrican Irene (which was not too bad out here), I got to some reading. One book is Rom Harre’s Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, an unusual but very accessible book about how living things have contributed to a scientific understanding of the world. It got me thinking about my friend and mentor, the late Fred Newman. How much he would have enjoyed Harre’s book (Fred was enamored of the creativity, rigor and improvisational nature of science). And how much Fred contributed to a new understanding of understanding the world (not scientific, but not unscientific either).

What do I mean by that? Here’s the brief introduction I wrote to the revised (2010) edition of Fred Newman’s book, Let’s Develop! (It’s a great book!)

1994, the year that Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth was first published, was also the year that the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) came out. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Let’s Develop!, written by philosopher and lay therapist Fred Newman with the assistance of his friend, sociologist Phyllis Goldberg, is informed by hundreds of ordinary people, the clients he saw in his social therapy practice. Its subject matter is people and their emotions, their pain, their dreams, their relationships, their therapeutic conversations, and their activity of growing. DSM-IV, written under the auspices of the American Psychiatric Association, is informed by over 200 psychiatrists and psychologists (nearly half of whom had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry). Its subject matter is 297 classified mental disorders, which serve as prototypes for judging patients’ symptoms and behaviors. When the DSM-IV came out there was minor protest, most of it around the pharmaceutical connections of the writers. In contrast, work on new edition due out in 2013 (referred to as DSM-5) is being carried out in a flurry of controversy over the even greater proliferation of mental disorders than with prior revisions.

Fred Newman thinks the DSM (all editions) is silly. Scientifically silly. Since he loves science and is quite knowledgable, his opinion on this carries some weight. If diagnose we must (and it’s not at all clear that we must), Newman says, then we should diagnose ourselves and each other, rather than take up the diagnoses of the so-called experts, people who don’t know us. Newman is one of many, many therapists, social scientists and philosophers who have written thoughtful and often scathing critiques of the medical model and pseudoscientific diagnostic approach to mental health and illness for academic books and journals. However, Newman is not primarily interested in critiquing; he’s interested in helping. Let’s Develop! is a self-help book, written for ordinary people. It’s an exceedingly practical book, which attempts to give the everyday usefulness of Newman’s social therapy to the average Joe and Jane. And precisely because it is so practical, I think it’s perhaps Newman’s most thoughtful and scathing critique. It is, to use a term Newman and I like very much, practical-critical.

In 1994 there was not all that much receptivity for the practical-critical from scholars. The divide between theoretical critique and alternative practice was great. Newman and I were emerging voices in the intellectual dialogues taking place on the unresolvable problems that arise from forcing human life into a natural science framework, and advocating for the creating of new psychologies. With Newman’s philosophical sophistication and my grounding in human development across the life span, we more than held our own. But it was our practice, in particular Newman’s social therapy practice, that set us apart as the most practically oriented of theoretical critiques. To make that statement loud and clear, we decided that Newman should write the practical guide that is Let’s Develop!

During the sixteen years since the book first appeared, the sharp distinction between critical intellectual debate and alternative practices in psychology and psychotherapy has begun to blur. New critical practices have developed and, like Newman’s social therapy, others have grown, and this has significantly advanced the overall substance and quality of the intellectual conversation. The debate continues, but critique and practice are now closer together.

If you’re not involved in these intellectual conversations, you might be wondering why you should care about this history and debate. Well, think about where your therapist, your child’s school counselor, your uncle’s addiction counselor or your mother’s social worker got her or his training. What were these professionals taught? How many different approaches were they exposed to? What understandings of how human beings grow and learn and feel and think do they work with? Do they think you and your family can grow emotionally, or do they think that all that can be done is modifying the most dysfunctional ways you all relate? Can they help you create your life (including your emotional life) or are they only concerned to treat the symptoms of your so-called mental disorder? The more that critical practice and theoretical critique intermingle, the more likely it is that the training future counselors and therapists receive will be broad and inclusive, and the answers to these questions will be thoughtful and rich with possibility.

Newman sees and does therapy as a creative activity, not as a medical procedure. Together, therapists and clients create the therapy—that’s how it works. He relates to people as creators of their development, no matter how severe their pain, “presenting problem” or psychiatric diagnosis. He never tries to fix a problem. Rather, he supports people to grow, to create their lives. There’s always a choice. Not as a denial of how one is, but as a loving act. Ask for help. Be giving. Share the shame. When a conversation is heading toward a screaming match, start it over again. Do something completely unlike you. You’ll still be “you” but it’ll be a you who’s actively becoming. Becoming what? Becoming you.

Newman’s social therapy is unique in its focus on people’s development, but it’s not alone in being humanistic and creative. This is good news for the growing masses of adults, children and families in need of help for whom the choices have been to “tough it out” without therapy or to be pathologized. Those who engage in social therapy or another of the dozens of alternative therapies that now exist are, by their very activity, critical psychologists as much, if not more, than their academic counterparts. Their voices, and those of their therapists, are slowly being heard in the seminar rooms and clinics that train tomorrow’s therapists and counselors.

It is in this revived playing field that we reissue Let’s Develop! Some slight changes have been made throughout the text to reflect life style changes that have occurred over the years but, overall, the content remains not only intact, but equally—if not more—relevant.

As a new reader of Let’s Develop!, you’ll be joining a global grouping of tens of thousands. Unlike most books, its following wasn’t built with advertising dollars or critical reviews, but by a community that it helped to grow through viral marketing. Across the US, social therapists gave it to clients, psychology professors to students, youth workers to urban teens, teacher trainers to school personnel, business coaches and consultants to executives. Colleagues of ours in other countries xeroxed chapters from their copies and handed them out to friends and family. Chapters were translated into different languages (the ones I know about are Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish) and used in university courses. Zdravo da Ste, a community of hundreds devoted to human development in Serbia, translated the book in its entirety, found a publisher and promotes it throughout the country to both the public and professionals.

I’ve worked with Fred Newman for most of my adult life on many social change projects. But none has been as difficult or rewarding as working to liberate psychology from its own pathology. “You don’t have to be sick to get help,” Newman insists. That’s the practical-critical message of Let’s Develop! It’s critical psychology at its best. Welcome to the “grassroots” critical psychology movement!

I share this news with deep sadness.  My dear friend, mentor and colleague Fred Newman passed away a few minutes before July 3 turned to July 4, Independence Day in the USA. Fred was nothing if not fiercely and passionately independent culturally and politically. But not psychologically or socially. He lived his life joyously collectively and helped thousands of others do the same.

Fred had a long and serious illness, but he worked and gave and led and taught until his last days. I and hundreds of others will miss him terribly. His passion and commitment live on in the global community Fred gave his life to building.

Below is Fred’s obituary placed in the New York Times by the All Stars Project , which Fred co-founded with Lenora Fulani. In addition to his work with the All Stars, Fred co-founded the East Side Institute with me as a place to develop and share social therapeutics and postmodern Marxist performance practice/theory and, in turn, be developed by those with whom it is shared, no matter their culture, class or continent. This work, and all that Fred set in motion, continues unabated.

FREDERICK D. NEWMAN

NEWMAN–Frederick Delano. The All Stars Project Board of Directors and staff are deeply saddened by the passing of the All Stars’ extraordinary and much loved co-founder, Fred Newman, Ph.D. He was 76. Dr. Newman was born in the South Bronx, grew up in the shadow of the old Yankee Stadium (becoming a lifelong Yankees fan), and served in the U.S. Army in Korea. Upon his return he completed his undergraduate studies at City College and went on to earn his Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and foundations of mathematics from Stanford University in 1962, where he was mentored by the renowned analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. All who knew him will remember him as a fierce champion for giving the best, most sophisticated, most far- reaching tools of postmodern philosophy to ordinary people. He taught at several colleges and universities in the 1960s before dedicating himself to community organizing and the creation of numerous independent education, health, mental health, cultural and political projects in New York and nationally. Dr. Newman was a practicing therapist for more than 30 years and was the founder of a new humanistic psychology known as Social Therapy. The author of numerous books and articles on postmodern, Vygotskian, and performatory psychology, he and his colleagues worked to develop and popularize their breakthrough discoveries about human development. He co-founded the All Stars Project with Lenora Fulani, Ph.D. in 1981 to bring this new science of development to the lives of inner-city young people. He was the chief designer of the All Stars Project’s performance- based development approach, which has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor, Black and Latino youth across the country and is providing a new theoretical and practical framework for eliminating poverty and underdevelopment. Dr. Newman was artistic director and playwright-in-residence of the All Stars’ Castillo Theatre from 1989 until 2005. Often a lightning rod for controversy, Fred Newman was a relentless champion for a new style of progressivism. He was also a pioneer in the development of independent politics in the United States, starting in the 1970s, and had a major hand in the creation of the Independence Party of New York, playing a key role in the party’s endorsement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, 2005, and 2009. Despite serious illness, Dr. Newman was unflagging in his work. He will be deeply missed by the Board of Directors, staff, volunteers and countless young people and their families in our poor communities whose lives he and his work have touched. We extend our deepest condolences to Dr. Newman’s life partners Gabrielle L. Kurlander, who so ably serves as the All Stars President and CEO, and Jacqueline S. Salit, and to his children Elizabeth and Donald and granddaughter, Jane. As we mourn the passing of our founder and friend Fred Newman, his legacy of radical humanism, his commitment to community, to development and to creating ensemble performances live on through the work of the All Stars Project.

Published in The New York Times on July 5, 2011

 

 

Fred Newman and I have written quite a bit about the specific ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein has influenced the social therapeutic practice and our understanding and articulation of the practice. As I teach a course/lead a conversation, “The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman,” these past three weeks (as part of the process of writing a new book), I am finding the responses to Newman’s and my writing very helpful. And that doesn’t apply only to the responses of the participants, but also to my own! I imagine other authors have similar experiences of reading something you wrote and feeling simultaneously the closeness of the writer and the distance of the reader. I find it a strangely pleasant disconcerting experience.

Here’s a passage from our book Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life that participants grappled and/or resonated with (and which I am quite fond of):

[Wittgenstein’s] self-appointed task was to cure philosophy of its illness.  (Ours, as we will try to show, is closer to curing “illness” of its philosophy.)  We are all sick people, says Wittgenstein.  No small part of what makes us sick is how we think (related in complicated ways to what we think and, even more fundamentally, to that we think or whether we think), especially how (that or whether) we think about thinking and other so-called mental processes and/or objects–something which we (the authors) think we (members of our culture) do much more than many of us like to think! It gets us into intellectual-emotional muddles, confusions, traps, narrow spaces; it torments and bewilders us; it gives us “mental cramps.”  We seek causes, correspondences, rules, parallels, generalities, theories, interpretations, explanations for our thoughts, words and verbal deeds (often, even when we are not trying to or trying not to).  But what if, Wittgenstein asks, there are none?

For centuries, great and not so great philosophers have tried to understand the mystery of thinking and, thereby, for some of them, resolve the “mind-body problem.” I’m glad of their continued efforts and wish them well. But I am equally if not more glad of—and thankful for—the many chances I and my colleagues have to involve ordinary folks (non-philosophers) from all walks of life in such conversations. We learned this from Newman, whose passion for philosophy is inseparable from his passion for changing the world, the synthesis embodied in his practice and, occasionally, in the written word: “Abstraction is something that is dangerous unless it is engaged in by the masses. I think abstraction is not simply something that CAN be done by the masses. I think it is a critical developmental activity for the masses to engage in.” (Psychological Investigations)

May 31, 2011

May is one of my favorite months of the year, with light lasting into the evening hours, baby green tree buds turning into adult green leaves, and bursts of color (both flowers and people’s clothing) dotting the city streets. But this year I spent the middle of the month far far away from New York City’s spring awakening. I was in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh conducting workshops on effective education for the 21st century, which introduced university faculty and students to performatory and playful learning and development approaches. And while there was no feel of spring in the very hot and very humid city air, the human awakening to the joy and intimacy of creating together was palpable.

I was invited to Dhaka by Daffodil International University, instigated by Syed Mizanur Rahman (“Raju”), an economist and drama educator who heads up the university’s Career Development Center. As a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class and participant in our Performing the World conferences, Raju has embraced performance as how to live one’s life developmentally and, being in a position to breathe life into the rigid and static British-based educational system of his country, he asked to partner with the Institute to help advance his work and socialize performance broadly within the school’s community. I was happy to agree and added my workshop facilitation partner Carrie Lobman, who is the Institute’s director of pedagogy and on the faculty of Rutgers University School of Education, as co-leader of the training week.

All told, Carrie and I worked and played with about 200 students, faculty and administrative personnel in six different workshops. Our broad thematic was that the shift underway from past centuries to the 21^st century is from questions about things (What is “X”?) to questions about process (How does “X” work?). We had prepared an overall plan of discussion topics and improv exercises but needed to hear what the specific issues were that people wanted to work on so we could work off them. Students and faculty alike were unhappy with the formality and rote nature of the learning environment they felt compelled to recreate and said they wanted to change. We worked with each group offering ways they could do so as well as, perhaps more important, ways they could create together outside the formal classrooms (which would, we believed, have a big impact on what happened in the classrooms). Working with the students was pure joy! They threw themselves into doing so many things they never dreamed they could do together. The faculty was a more conflicted grouping. While many willingly went along with our invitations to create and imagine, some could not move beyond “tell us exactly what to do”—rejecting the very stance we were trying to get them to consider giving up, holding on to their own authority as experts and the institutional authority of knowing.

We also met with the high-level dignitaries of the university, had a lovely dinner with the chair of the board of the Daffodil Group (founders of the University), and watched a moving performance by the Daffodil All Stars of a play written by Raju.

Raju and his assistant, Md. Ziaul Haque Sumon (Sumon), were exceptional hosts and great organizers—gracious, relaxed, reassuring and proud of what they’re doing and our relationship. In addition to our work at Daffodil, they took us to Raju’s alma mater, Jahangimagar University, where we were treated to a great performance by the current members of the theatrical group he founded there many years ago; to the new campus site of Daffodil outside of the city, where this August Raju and Sumon will orient the 500 incoming students (performatorily) to university life; to villages and monuments and a heartbreakingly poor section of the city to meet a remarkable woman who cares for children of sex workers.

Back in New York, May’s spring is transitioning to June’s summer and I to the luxuries of American life and to the work at hand. I feel humbled and privileged that this work now includes this new relationship with Daffodil University, dozens of new friends, and the opportunity to contribute in unknowable ways to the development of the people of Bangladesh.