Author: loisholzman

02 Apr More on Police and Teens: Venturing beyond “the narrow circle and narrow boundaries” of their individual experience

Posted at 01:01h in Community Organizing, Creativity, Culture, Human Development, Outside of School, Performance Movement, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

My last post, “Police and Teens, Connecting” (March 29, 2017 ) pointed to an article that appeared in The New York Times that same day. The article featured a unique kind of “connecting” of police and teens—Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, a program of the All Stars Project in partnership with the...

30 Mar Police and Teens, Connecting

Posted at 17:58h in Community Organizing, Culture, I Like This, Outside of School, What's New 0 Comments

Article in The New York Times (March 30, 2017) on Lenora Fulani and Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, a project of the All Stars Project. What happens when you bring together 10 teenagers from poor communities and 10 police officers to try to get them to talk? Read more ...

26 Mar Words to Ponder #24

Posted at 23:15h in Creativity, I Like This, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Social Therapy, Words to Ponder 0 Comments

"Science, Spirituality and Social Therapy" is the theme of this quote from Fred Newman (from the book Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy, Edited by Lois Holzman & Rafael Mendez). I think there is a powerful and important connection between spirituality and human growth. For the bulk of this...

12 Mar Creativity and Community—No Dead Prose Here!

Posted at 01:49h in Creativity, Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, Performance Movement, Play, Social Therapy, Theatre, Vygotsky 0 Comments

I'm looking forward to celebrating the launch of my Palgrave Macmillan book series, Studies in Play, Performance, Learning and Development tomorrow afternoon, March 12. Creativity and Community among Autism-Spectrum Youth: Creating Positive Social Updrafts through Play and Performance, edited by Peter Smagorinsky, is not only the first in the series,...

09 Mar Performance Activist Hector Aristizabal

Posted at 20:28h in Applied Theatre, Community Organizing, Events, Performance Movement 0 Comments

Hector Aristizabal is my guest for another in the series Making a Conceptual Revolution, to take place on Friday evening March 17, 2017. A friend since Performing the World 2012, Hector travels the world bringing his story and gifts to communities beset by violence and trauma. While he's in NYC,...

09 Mar Podcast: Revolutionary Transformation Through Play

Posted at 19:25h in Interviews, Look and Listen 0 Comments

Last month I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Burgert Kirsten for his regular podcast coming out of Cape Town, South Africa. Our topic? "Revolutionary Transformation Through Play." A coach (his company is called Liminal Transformational Coaching), organizational psychologist, improvisor and father of two young children, Burgert has quite a lot...

28 Feb Words to Ponder #23

Posted at 18:28h in I Like This, Psychotherapy, Theatre, What's New, Words to Ponder 2 Comments

Fred Newman was a playwright and theatre director as well as a social therapist (and philosopher, community organizer and political strategist). He loved creating conversation on therapy and theatre. Here's excerpts from a class he gave on The Therapeutics of Theatre—in 2002, and just as relevant (maybe more so) 15 years later. My...

15 Feb Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Posted at 19:46h in Culture, Look and Listen, Politics 0 Comments

Last week, as part of their residency in NYC, the East Side Institute's International Class went from Manhattan to the South Bronx. They visited the Bronx Documentary Center and were wowed by the current exhibit. Entitled "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" the show features nearly 40 photographers whose images of demonstrations...

14 Feb Words to Ponder #22

Posted at 17:05h in Activity Theory, I Like This, Philosophy, Postmodern Marxism, Social Therapy, Words to Ponder 0 Comments

Groups. Individuals. Decisions. Descriptions. Science. Measurement. Therapy. Fred Newman brings them all together in "Undecidable Emotions (What is Social Therapy? And How is it Revolutionary?)". Here's an excerpt from the article published in 2003 in The Journal of Constructivist Psychology (Volume 16, pp. 215-232). You can read the article in...

10 Feb 10 Positive News Stories from Patch

Posted at 21:12h in I Like This 0 Comments

From Patch Adams and the Gesundheit Institute: Hello my friends! Lots of people have people have been calling me and telling me how sad, mad, or angry they feel about the political discussion lately. While we here at the Gesundheit Institute do not want to weigh into political discussions, we would like...