Right after being at TEDMED I flew to Vancouver, British Columbia for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). There are 25,000 members! And about half that number actually come to the five-day meeting. These are the folks who teach education courses at colleges and universities and train new educational researchers, their graduate students, directors and program people at research and evaluation organizations, deans and administrators and advocates. So many educated people!

I’m a long-time AERA member, I present something each year, and I just finished my tenure as chair of one of its many (SIGs) Special Interest Groups—Cultural-Historical Research. For three years I’ve been leading the effort to bring play and its importance to the learning process to AERA. This is no small task, as play is nowhere to be found in this organization. A look through the 300+ entries in the annual meeting program index comes up empty for play, performance and creativity (and overflowing with assessment, evaluation, curriculum studies, special education, and school reform). And a few years ago, a petition to form a Play SIG was denied by the association.

Be that as it may, my SIG—Cultural-Historical Research—is one of the very few that annually sponsors sessions on play and/or performance. And this year, we had a great one! For our meeting/social hour, we featured a brief talk by Graduate Student Award winner Tony Perone,  and a panel organized by Carrie Lobman featuring play researchers/advocates Joan Almon (Alliance for Childhood), Mike Askew (Monash University), Andrew Burton (Street Spirits Theatre Company),  Artin Göncü (University of Illinois-Chicago), and Jaime Martinez (NY Institute of Technology). They involved the audience in some simple play activities and each speaker was as passionate, compelling and playful as any TEDMED speaker I heard earlier that week. The crowd was small and it’s my hope that the new SIG officers will continue to reach out and build the play movement within AERA.

I also attended a session in which part of the discussion was how it was hard to be a Vygottskian educator in the US and countries that are following the US model (which, one speaker, called “a road to hell”). As it often does among researchers, the conversation among speakers and the audience turned to talk of teachers, including their “resistance.”  My experience in these kinds of discussions is that they go nowhere fast. So, when called on I said I was speaking as a community organizer. I told them that one of my missions has been to make Vygotsky a household word by speaking with kids, parents— everyone—about learning and developing. Parents and students need to be let in on the way learning is understood, how they are being taught, and hear of other approaches including Vygotsky’s. I asked them why they were only speaking of and to teachers and urged them to open up the conversation about a Vygotskian understanding of the learning-developing process. I got some applause and sat down.

While its politics aren’t particularly conservative, AERA is very conservatively organized and structured and, as such, it contributes to its members remaining conservative—comfortable with what and who they already know and do, even if the impact on the everyday lives of children and educators is minimal. I’ll keep organizing!

Deciding What’s Normal. What a great topic for me to lobby folks around at the TEDMED conference this coming week in Washington, D.C. The topic and I are 1 of 50 “Great Challenges” in health and medicine that will be represented at the conference, along with the usual program of speakers and dinners and networking. I’m thrilled I was chosen as a Great Challenge Advocate, and look forward to discovering and creating what that means! Of course, I’ll be talking about the DSM-5 controversy.

I’m also excited to attend the whole conference. I love TED Talks. I tell people where ever I go to watch one every day—for their health. A few weeks ago I gave a TED Talks “course” at the All Stars Project’s free university-style development center for people of all ages, showing one talk each week, followed by discussion and some performance exercises. It’s very gratifying to see people create conversation and joy in how they’re learning and growing together!

Here’s the description of my Great Challenge:

Deciding What’s Normal
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is about to be revised for the fifth time, redefining what counts as mental pathology and what doesn’t.

There’s already controversy about making it harder to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome, and making it easier to count grief as a treatable “condition.” But it’s not only psychiatry where the boundaries of normal will shift. They also shift with blood pressure levels and cholesterol levels, to name several major parameters. (The metrics themselves don’t change — just the ranges that are considered “normal” readings.)

These definitions have huge implications in terms of insurance coverage and reimbursement, pharmaceutical development, and our very sense of ourselves. Who should decide what’s “normal” — and how?

Today I read Joanne Cacciatore’s blog. She’s the founder of the MISS Foundation, an international nonprofit organization with 75 chapters around the world aiding parents whose children have died or are dying at any age and from any cause. (She’s also a professor and researcher at Arizona State University and a psychotherapist.)

A few weeks ago Dr. Cacciatore wrote an entry, “DSM5 and Ethical Relativism,” opposing the proposed change in the DSM’s “bereavement exclusion,” which has to do with how much time you can grieve the death of a loved one before you’re deemed pathological (specifically, having a Depressive Disorder). It turns out that in the DSM-III, in use from 1980-1994, the bereavement exclusion was two years. Then its replacement, the DSM-IV, reduced it to two months. And the new DSM-5 wants to reduce it again, this time to 2 weeks! Talk about crazy!

Dr. Cacciatore’s blog went viral and within two weeks had 100,000 readers. She was prompted by this response and the outpouring of comments to write an Open Letter to the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association and to the DSM 5 Task Force (dated March 21, 2012) on behalf of these many thousands of people. She notes in her letter that “there is no empirical standing for the arbitrary two-week time frame, and thus this proposal not only contradicts good common sense but also rests on weak scientific evidence” and that the proposed revision “challenges what it means to be human and for some may be dangerous.”

It’s a strong letter. Spread the word!

Here’s some other voices speaking about the DSM-5.

First, Dr. Anthony Rao. Tony is a pediatric psychologist, founder of Behavioral Solutions in Lexington MA, and author of The Way of Boys: Promoting the Social and Emotional Development of Young Boys. I met Tony in 2010 when I interviewed him and Christine LaCerva, director of the Social Therapy Group and of clinical training at the East Side Institute, on the topic, “Breakthroughs in Child Psychology” (view on You Tube). Both Tony and Christine work with children diagnosed with ADHD, autism and Asperger’s and, while one practices cognitive behavioral therapy and the other social therapy, we discovered in the interview how much they shared. Tony recently appeared on Boston TV commenting on the DSM-5. Here’s the video clip.

I also heard from Sami Timimi, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Director of Postgraduate Education in the National Health Service in Lincolnshire, UK. He told me about a campaign he launched a few months ago—“No More Psychiatric Labels.” It’s an interesting read, especially refreshing coming from a psychiatrist. Here’s the concluding paragraph:

By lazily importing the diagnostic model from general medicine we end up miss-selling and under-utilising the unique skills the profession of psychiatry brings to healthcare by the ‘dumbing down’ of what we do into simplistic diagnosis driven protocols that has more to do with successful consumer culture marketing than science. Changing to more evidence compatible paradigms is now long overdue.

I’m glad to be introduced to Dr. Timimi, who has written several books on critical psychiatry that I plan to mull over.

A friend sent me a link to the Association for Women in Psychology information on “Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis: Concerns about DSM-V” complete with petitions. I plan to read up on this initiative.

Please let me and my readers know of others saying interesting things!

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.

October 3, 2012

Here’s a more graphic rendition of the Performing the World invitation and call for proposals.

October 2, 2011

I’m thrilled to announce the next Performing the World (PTW) conference/festival, “Can Performance Change Save the World?” to take place in New York City October 4-7, 2012. Proposals are due March 1, 2012.

The theme of the last PTW, held in 2010 and attended by over 500 people from dozens of countries, was, “Can Performance Change the World?” The depth of the challenges facing humanity two short years later have led the conveners of Performing the World to recast the question for the 2012 conference as, “Can Performance Save the World?”

Performing the World (PTW) was born in a conversation between East Side Institute co-founder, the late Fred Newman, and me at the end of the summer of 2000. We had already “discovered” performance, and its essential role in human development and learning was key to the therapeutic, educational and community-organizing work of the East Side Institute and its broader community. At the same time, Newman and I were also having conversations with Ken and Mary Gergen, leading social-constructionist psychologists who themselves were turning toward performance, particularly by experimenting with new performatory modes of presenting research and scholarship. During the 1990s at annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, we and the Gergens did some joint performatory symposia and Newman’s original “psychology plays” were performed—all to great enthusiasm. We were encouraged, and wanted to do something bigger and of our own structure.

My international travels had introduced me to many different performatory practices initiated at both the grassroots and from within the universities. I met dozens of people and heard of hundreds more who were using performance to help people and communities grow and create positive social change. We decided to reach out to those doing this work/play—from community organizers to business people, from artists to social workers, from therapists to teachers.

The first Performing the World conference was held in October 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. Hundreds from all over the world showed up at the beautiful ocean side village of Montauk, 120 miles from New York City, as if this kind of gathering was what they and their communities needed at such a moment.

There have been five PTWs since then. The last two—in 2008 and 2010—were held in New York City, bringing the conference to one of the most vibrant and diverse cultural centers of the world and partnering with the All Stars Project as co-sponsor. PTW has been greatly enriched by having the All Stars’ performing arts and development center on 42 Street near Times Square as the conference’s home base and by the inclusion of hundreds of young people and adults who participate in its programs. Additionally, both the Institute and the All Stars reach out to friends across New York City’s many communities to provide housing for PTW participants and broaden the “performance space.” I am inspired by the growth of the global performance movement and the role that PTW is playing in it, as not only a conference/performance festival but also a unique community event bringing people together to perform a new world.

Hundreds of messages are filling my inbox—outpourings of condolences, love and respect on the passing of Fred Newman. From all corners of the world those who studied with Fred, read one of our books, heard him speak in person or on video, or “met” him through others are writing to share their appreciation for all he has built. And share their stories—what they remember from an encounter, a life-changing therapeutic or performance experience, a radically re-orienting world view provocation. Reading these messages from so many friends and colleagues, and responding to them, is very moving. It’s as if societal time has momentarily stopped and I/we are world historical.

Fred’s life and accomplishments are noted in an official New York Times obituary that appeared this past weekend. It focuses on his influence on independent politics in the US and New York City politics overall. As you’ll see, the first line comments that Fred’s influence defies easy description. Fred would be gratified to read this, as he was very sceptical of the value of description, easy and otherwise, in the human social activity of creating a new world.

July 9, 2011

Fred Newman, Writer and Political Figure, Dies at 76

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description.

He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states.

He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.

Mr. Newman, who died at 76 in his Manhattan home on July 3, eschewed conventionality. He insisted, for instance, that there was nothing wrong with psychotherapists having sex with patients. He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot.

“If it weren’t for the Independence Party, Mike Bloomberg might not have become mayor,” said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College.

In turn, Mr. Bloomberg supported the Independence Party’s goal of nonpartisan municipal elections and gave the party more than $650,000 of his own money. His administration arranged millions of dollars in bond financing in 2002 and 2006 for a building for Mr. Newman’s nonprofit All Stars Project, which uses the performing arts to help low-income children.

Mr. Newman began his climb to influence in New York in the 1960s, when, from his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he formed a Marxist collective called “If … Then.” Its members, many of them self-professed anarchists, collected money on the streets for the group. Most participated in Mr. Newman’s newly articulated “social therapy,” which encouraged patients to change themselves by seeking to change society. He encouraged collective members to sleep with one another, an activity he called “friendosexuality.” The collective published newspapers and started a dental clinic.

“It’s probably fair to say I was the dominant leader,” Mr. Newman said in an interview with The New York Observer in 1999. “I hope I wasn’t an authoritarian oppressor, but I think that’s probably accurate to say that.”

His detractors, however, said his “collective” amounted to a cult. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, which studies unorthodox political groups, called Mr. Newman “a master at creating a myth of importance.” “He was a brilliant charlatan,” Mr. Berlet said.

Frederick Delano Newman was born in the Bronx on June 17, 1935, and grew up there. His mother chose the same middle name as that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hero of hers. After his father died when young Fred was 9, his mother raised her five children alone, supported by welfare checks, the rent from rooms in her house, near Yankee Stadium, and the fees she earned running poker games.

Mr. Newman hated school but tested well enough to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He worked as a toolmaker to help support his family. At 19, he joined the Army and served in Korea. He graduated from the City College of New York and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford in 1962.

He was twice married and divorced. He is survived by his son, Donald; his daughter, Elizabeth Newman; and by Gabrielle L. Kurlander and Jacqueline Salit, his life partners in what Ms. Salit described as an “unconventional family of choice.” He died of renal failure, his spokeswoman, Christina DiChiara, said.

Mr. Newman taught at City College but was fired after giving male students A’s to help them avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Other colleges hired him but fired him for the same reason. A job as a drug counselor led to his therapy career.

After forming his Upper West Side collective, Mr. Newman, in 1974, allied his group with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., originally a leftist leader who veered to right-wing conspiracy theories and ran for president eight times from the political fringe. Tensions between the two prompted Mr. Newman to break the alliance after less than a year, however. He then formed the International Workers Party from what he called his core collective, with a mission to advance minority rights and a leftist agenda.

The party was dissolved at the end of the 1970s. Mr. Newman then founded the New Alliance Party as a vehicle for moving beyond a narrow leftist spectrum. Around the same time, he met Ms. Fulani, a graduate student who attended one of his clinics and joined the collective. Mr. Newman helped mold her into a political professional who for many years was the face of his political ventures.

“She is one of my life’s proudest accomplishments,” he told New York Newsday in 1992.

In 1988, as her campaign manager, he helped Ms. Fulani get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, something no black candidate or woman had done. She received more than 200,000 votes. In 1992, Ms. Fulani ran again, and raised more than $2 million from private donors.

In 1991, the New Alliance Party gave strong support to Mr. Sharpton, then a community advocate, at a time when he was struggling for broader political recognition. It provided Mr. Sharpton with income, public relations help and up to half the participants in his demonstrations, often protesting attacks against blacks.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Newman began a campaign to encourage more independent voices in politics, almost regardless of ideology. These included Mr. Perot, Ralph Nader and even the conservative stalwart Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr. Newman supported a succession of reform parties, ultimately capturing control of the New York City branch of the Independence Party.

As late as 2005, Mr. Newman wrote that he remained a Marxist, albeit what he called a postmodern one. His final cause was to end the two-party system, which he believed stifled real choice. He wanted primary elections to be open to all parties, and to have all candidates run against one another. The top two would vie in a general election.

That proposal prompted a question from Mr. Bloomberg one day in 2001 when the future mayor was seeking Mr. Newman’s support, Ms. Salit recalled. Mr. Bloomberg asked him if he would be putting himself out of business if he were to give up the ballot line he had used so effectively.

“We’re an anti-party party,” Mr. Newman answered. “We want to be put out of business.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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