Today’s ponderings come from Winnie the Pooh, who I’m finding remarkably relevant to living/becoming/developing in this strange and scary 21st century. So philosophical! So Vygotskian! So post-postmodern! (Thank you, A.A.Milne for your creation.) “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that...
That's the title of an invited address I gave in 2011 at the Third International Academic Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies in Hangzhou China, just three months after Fred Newman passed away. Today, my colleagues and I are in the early stages of designing some kind of video documentary of...
I’ve been series editor for the Palgrave Studies in Play, Performance, Learning and Development since 2016. It’s been a great opportunity to support the publication of books that link play and performance to community development and learning and development across the life span—and to get to know the creative researchers...
The world that we live in both shapes us and is shaped by us. It’s always been violent and peaceful, loving and hateful (as are we). These past few years, though, the violence and hatred feel more frightening, more painful; the devastation and despair more intense and soul-wrenching, the newest...
Almost 20 years ago, the late Fred Newman and I wrote an essay for an academic journal in critical psychology. We titled it All Power to the Developing! We meant to provoke academics with such a politically-rooted slogan-sounding title. (And we did.) This past January, we at the East Side Institute resurrected this...
I'm pleased to share a guest blog post by Dan Friedman. *** Jesse Green, the chief theatre critic for the New York Times, recently published an article, “Should the American Theatre Take French Lessons?” about demonstrations across France, which have included protestors breaking into and occupying locked-up theaters across the country. They’re...
I just received a review of my book The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world that I am sharing. Phillippe Vendenbroeck really completes (in a Vygotskian sense) my thoughts and written words. And the site he posted it...
Today's words are by the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who passed away February 22, 2021 at the age of 101. I have so many favorites, this one among them. I Am Waiting I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for...
On January 1, 2021 the East Side Institute brought in the new year with the launch of our podcast, All Power to the Developing. This is a project I'm very excited about. It's a way to reach a wide audience with amazing stories from developmentalists across the world. So much...
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. Ursula K. Le Guin...
