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?

A huge thanks to my friend Tony Perone for alerting me to a recent TED Talk by Stephen Volan, “Approaching Autism Theatrically.” Diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult, Stephen shares how he experiences himself in the world, at one point likening it to just about constant stage fright. His talk is lovely—funny, poignant, smart. He brings in the DSM-5, Second City, Virginia Spolin, his height (6’8″), play, improv, Shakespeare, as he tells of his journey to become a social player “on the stage that is all the world.”

Support the dialogue on human development/possibility/becoming by passing this video along!

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

Last week in The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman we played with the Newman play in which Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein are in therapy with a social therapist (referred to in my last post). I asked folks to break up into four groups and perform the readings of the play in any way they wanted. I said that plays are meant to be performed and that inviting them to perform it together would, I hoped and expected, create an open and creative environment for ensuing conversation. One group broke themselves up into the three characters and commented that it was lovely to hear and relate to multiple Wittgensteins and Vygotskys and Brauns. Another group played with pitch and loudness, and ended with whispering the lines into each other’s ears. There was no shortage of creativity among the groups!

The conversation we wound up creating meandered (my favorite kind) with, in hindsight, a continued focus on what it means to understand and how we create understanding, both as individuals and as a group. Specifically, we spent time speaking about “will” and “motivation” and the activity of doing the unexpected and its relationship to playing like children (what does it mean that, as one participant said, “Everyone was willing to go into the groups and perform”); about reading/performing when you have no idea what you’re reading (the assumption being this is not a good thing, but we questioned that in light of assumptions about what language is); and about the experience of appreciating what they created.

Tonight is the final week. The reading is an article by Newman and Ken Gergen, expanded from an APA presentation the two of them made in 1995. It’s titled, “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order.” (It’s a chapter in my edited book, Performing Psychology.) I’m looking forward to helping the class with this challenging and important academic piece that argues for a move away from both pictorial and a pragmatic views of language to one of relational activity—and the democratization of diagnosis. Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are, again, characters. As is social therapy, this time with Newman himself.

In my work as a developmentalist, I am an advocate of, doer of, and studier of play. I grapple with both implementing and understanding what Lev Vygotsky said: “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself” —and its practical applications and implications for people of all ages.

Having begun a three-session East Side Institute Revolutionary Conversation last night (where we touched on play quite a bit) and preparing today for a keynote address on play, performance and pretense that I’ll give in a few weeks at the Association for Experiential Education international conference, I’ve been playing with play today. Here’s some thoughts to ponder and comment on—and aid me in my thinking/speaking!

Vygotsky tells us that it’s the interplay of imagination—which frees us, and rules—which constrain us, that makes play potentially developmental. The action created in the “imaginative sphere” frees the players from situational constraints and, at the same time, imposes constraints of its own. In this way, “play creates a zone of proximal development of the child… Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play and make it the highest level of preschool development.”

This freedom from environmental constraints (“reality”) in free play has similarities with theatrical play, or performance, especially the unscripted, improvisational kind. In both free and theatrical play, the players are more directly the producers of their activity, in charge of generating and coordinating the perceptual, cognitive and emotional elements of the play. When I look at children’s free play with this performance lens, I see the value of play in a new light.

For most psychologists and educators the value of play is that it facilitates the learning of social-cultural roles. Through acting out roles (play-acting), children “try out” the roles they will soon take on in “real life.”

I get this, but I think it skips over the paradox of pretend play—when children are pretending, they are least like what they are pretending to be! When they play school they are least like teachers and students because teachers and students in school are not playing at being teachers and students, but rather acting out their societally determined roles. Children playing school, or Mommy and Daddy, or Harry Potter and Dumbledore, are not acting out predetermined roles. They are creating new performances of themselves—at once the playwrights, directors and performers. They are creating culture. This is how I make sense of Vygotsky’s understanding that in play the child acts as though a head taller —that the developmental potential of play is as performed activity and not as behavioral acting. Not only for chidren but for us all.

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.

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’ve written before about the All Stars Project’s unique and fabulous UX, a free, open-to-all, university-style development center, but it’s worth mentioning over and over. This new project creates its curriculum from suggestions for courses from those who want to learn and ideas from those who want to teach something. Dean Lenora Fulani and Associate Dean Dan Friedman lead and coordinate this new initiative—a truly postmodern Zone of Proximal Development.

Here’s this week’s e-newsletter.