Post #5...Our Time Has Come, and the Pink sea has been parted

I like the way the introduction of Pinks book opens with a biblical sounding declaration, "...artists, inventors, designers, storytellers....big picture thinkers...", and 'Big Idea' meaning makers, "...will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." and so it came to pass as right-brains asserted themselves and rose up to follow their chosen democratic leader, Daniel, as he parted the logical, linear seas. For it was Daniel that the Goddess of creativity, Sarasvati, beckoned to create a great stage for all the artists to perform upon. On this world stage many forms of imagination and creation would take place. The R-Directed players would interact, improvise and construct as the L-Directed doers would manage and maintain the business behind the stage.

After reading all the chapters and watching Daniel Pink speak, I felt a calm, warm feeling come over me, even though I know it is getting late, I should be in bed and done writing already. The feeling has to do with acknowledgment and a sense of validation. All three authors mentioned things that I feel I have always known and or that I have always had an inclination toward. I do feel like my time has come yet as a R-Directed student, I have had to enlist the troops and all the reserves from my L-Directed mind to get me where I wanted to be...'Here'..now. Like Daniel Pink says in A Whole New Mind, "In the end, yin always needs yang." (25). Pink speaks how left brain thinkers have been in the drivers seat and now it is right brain thinkers turn behind the wheel. I can understand this as far as business and economics go yet I don’t agree that right brain thinkers were passengers. I guess I never felt like a passenger and I have always been behind the wheel with my foot on the gas heading toward unexplored territories with a wild anticipation of what lies beyond the next turn. I think that Pink opened his right brain window, wide, allowing the light to illuminate that which he calls the "six senses". This colorful flood of sensation was like a divine intervention. He experienced the power of the Creative Goddess and knew he had to spread the word. (I love when our team wins one. It's like "red rover, red rover send Daniel right over").

And then there is Freedman and Eisner both preaching the word of a healthy, balanced, culturally attuned, democratic, explicit and implicit curriculum. I say "Amen" to that! These were my favorite chapters so far, since I can directly relate them to my student teaching. I must first start with an apology to my anti-art teacher. I feel that I made some misinformed judgments. I am now seeing how the Left Brain directors have created conditions, restrictions and ridged policies, which hinder, and prevent my host teacher from exercising her own playfulness and using more of an "expressive outcome" when implementing her curriculum instead of the outdated "operationalized objectives" curriculum. Eisner,(161). "Expressive outcomes are the outcomes that students realize in the course of a curriculum activity, whether or not they are the particular outcomes sought." Eisner, (161). Freedman picks up on this in her, "Five Conditions of the Curriculum Process" and she states in condition number three that, "curriculum is a creative production.....", "Acts of teaching and learning are part of the process of curriculum. it is a translation of knowledge into information that is selected, organized, and interpreted by the curriculum developer which is then taught to students through another interpretation, which will be reinterpreted by the students as they create their own knowledge." (110).  My host teacher wants to be more playful and allow for deeper learning, yet she/he has been oppressed by prescribed, measured objectives and standards that she/he claims use to work, yet lately she/he has noticed a change in attitude and cooperation from the students. For me this has been so much more then a leaning experience in how to run a class and deliver a lesson. I am seeing how it takes just as much energy and time trying to control, and manage a classroom to stay obedient while following technical steps and similar objectives, without question; compared to the time and energy it takes to allow for conversation, exploration, imagination and group participation. There is a big difference between just following rules and expectations so that there is no room for mistakes or questionable content and feeling socially responsible as an educator who aids students in making cognitive connections with relevant, visual culture while at the same time allowing for conceptual conflict. I think Eisner's idea of a curriculum that is explicit, implicit and null, is more in tune with a Yin/Yang balanced curriculum. "Classroom ambiance, school norms, modes of assessment, and the like teach not explicitly, but implicitly. Thus, we not only have an explicit curriculum in schools, but also and implicit curriculum, and it is the implicit curriculum that endures while sections of the explicit curriculum change over time;..." (158).

I can say that I have witnessed the meaning of Eisner's quote, "When birds have led their life in a cage, it is not difficult to understand that when the door is opened, they might not have a desire to leave." (153)

The 6th and 7th grade students I have been working with have not been given choices, not allowed to question or investigate and not allowed to define their own goals. They have not had any practice in exercising their imagination or sense of play. Therefore when I revealed my Big Idea lesson and gave them opportunities to do all of those, above, things, they were confused. They liked the presentation and after several examples, videos, tutorials with constant questions and answers they still did not know where to start or how to create their very own ideas without a step by step one-size-fits-all hand out. Along with helping my baby birds learn to fly; I am also realizing what my purpose is and how to utilize all my years of being a 'R-directed thinker'. My cumulative incarnations of actress punk-rock beat poet drummer improvisational comic have all led me to my final holistic expression of the artist that uses teaching as her medium to construct a multifaceted ever evolving class of brave new birds confident in their ability to fly. 

(Thank you Sarasvati for your Divine inspiration!)

Sarasvati is the Hindu Goddess of all arts: music, painting, sculpture, dance, and writing. She is credited with presenting the gift of writing to mankind so that her songs could be written down and preserved. Sarasvati is often depicted on the back of a swan or peacock, and with four arms, with which she plays the lute or drum and bestows jeweled blessings. She is the Goddess of eloquence, and words pour from her like a sweetly flowing river. One myth of this Goddess is that She is a jealous rival of the Goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, and that pursuing wealth alone will assure that Sarasvati's gifts will desert you.