ROYSTON MALDOOM: RYTHM IS IT
Royston Maldoom has been one of my greatest artistic inspirations for The Learning Lab. The movie RYTHM IS IT shows not only someone who really cares about the growth of kids but also how that sometimes clashes with the school system itself. Royston takes no nonsense, he is not democratic and definitely not easy going, instead he sees the kids for what they really are, beautiful, and expects them to live up to what he knows they are capable of. They exceed themselves because they trust that he will take them to a place for which they secretly long.
DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE
With the Day of Dialogue comming up, students from the Lab we run at Amsterdam University experiment and get trained in facilitating dialogue. What more important capacity is there than the ability to have a good conversation?
LEARNING LAB 4
We started Lab 4 of the Learning Lab in Amsterdam. An amazing kick-off in Chartres and Illiers-Combray, the birth place of Marcel Proust, set the stage for a thrilling adventure. Before such an event I am filled with expectation and excitement. It is always a gift to be allowed in the lives of people on the moment that they decide to stand up, to live the best version of themselves and engage fully in their research. The conditions for that decision we try to put in place at an early stage. After that the creative enquiry that they will carry out, and the initiatives that they will take rest on a firm foundation. But to most educators’s ears this sounds strange. What has the one to do with the other? Why should educators, learning agents, or what else we should be calling the pedagogues in our organisations and schools, be concerned with the learner’s decision to live a full life? We educate the mind, if only to one side and rather uncreatively. We have began to start thinking about the importane of emotions and relationships. But to educate the will of our students, or co-creators for that matter, has not even crossed our minds. The will to live, to find out, to know, to engage and create what really matter to you.
Over the past century the control of humanity over its environment has overcome almost every constraint that nature imposed on us, and in large parts of the world we have liberated ourselves from social, cultural and religious bonds. We can choose to study, buy, or do almost anything that before was reserved for only a few. With all that freedom and power, what still makes sense? What responsibility does that imply, not necessarily in a moral sense, but existentially?
Schools and universities educate to analyse the world in ever greater detail by which we gain an ever greater feeling of control over what we see. But in fact we still stand powerless at the overwhelming range of possibilities from which we have to choose, or which we might still create. Knowledge and possibility are paralyzing without purpose. Like Ulrich from Musil’s “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” we wander around in an abundance of skill but without a craft and vocation through which to realise ourselves and shape the world around us.
What if we need to re-think practically every system in which we live (from the family to politics, from religion to the economy), and never learned to design the world in which we want to live? Not in a utopian sense, on an idyllic community eco-farm, separated from the mess we made, but in the middle of it and through our own vocations. How do we discover and educate our deeper will to want what fulfills us? And how do we learn to develop our collective will to create the highest version of what we are together as a city or society?
Two ingredients form the basis of the learning laboratory this year; a certain quality of resistance, and a certain quality of attention. So far the resistance our students met has been more than they have had to deal with in any other academic endeavour. Physically on their ‘pilgrimage’ to France, emotionally in confrontation with themselves and wach other, and mentally on their own responsibility to find out what matters to them. The experiment has begun.
BMW GUGGENHEIM LAB
The BMW Guggenheim lab is an amazing initiative that I got involved in this year. A temporary and mobile laboratory/urban think tank/art and community centre to solve the wicked questions of living in world cities. But what is really exciting about it is that it is to result in built and living exemple on that site of what living in a world city c/should look like today. In the 3 months or so that the Lab settles in the heart of the city (in this case Manhattan) the neighborhood, scientists, artists, politicians, business and the global community is activated to think along and enact what needs to be build or done on that very spot that will develop the city on a local, social and systemic/global level.
SENNETT ON LEARNING THROUGH TOUCH
I learned a great deal from Richard Sennett during his supervision of my PhD, in particular I learned to attend to the quality of relationships between the individual, his experience and his environment. With The Learning Lab we are addressing the whole human being as a creator and not a just a passive receiver of education. And as a creator the student learns by reflected experience, intuition, and continuous dialogue with his or her environment. In this lecture, which Sennett gave last month in Amsterdam, he talks about touch, and how we learn and create not just by using our heads, but primarily through the sense of touch.
TELEOLOGENIC LEARNING
I love it when people give words to what I’m working at. John Moravec always strikes me with how he finds ways to name the thing.
By Arthur M. Harkins & John W. Moravec
SOCIAL ECOLOGY
I love the term ecosystem, if only it had not that dark green sound to it. That’s changing though because I hear myself use it ever more often to describe this complex of open relationships between different people and their organisms, disciplines, fields, belief systems, structures, functions, proceses and purposes. I wouldn’t know how else to call it, so I want to attempt a re-appropriation the term.
Ernst Haeckel used the word “oekologie” (from Greek: οἶκος, “house”; -λογία, “study of”) in 1866 to describe the study of an organism’s relationship to its environment, and the discipline of ecology was born. Study of the house, that in which we live, and that is not necessarily a biological environment, we have a social, psychological, spatial, and economical life as well, and so has any QUESTION. Not only people have a house, issues and companies do too. An ecosystem is then an interconnected network or community of self-organised complex organisms that in themselves live in a variety of larger contexts on which they are interdependent as well in some way. That really fascinates me: the bigger picture.
Real wicked questions can only be solved when you step up a level in the ecology and see a bigger picture, or as Einstein no famously put it “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”. This requires lateral thinking which allows for more realities and possible truths to exist next to one another and at the same time. Scale up a noch, or down if you will, move sideways into a parallel understanding of the same phenomenon, and you start to see a different picture. One in which what seemed the problem becomes the purpose, or no longer is an issue. One person’s problem is someone else’s solution.
Social ecology is an approach to movement and development for me. Movement on a systemic level is created by the type and quality of relationships between people who see and experience the world in a particular way and those who see it in another way. Development stops if these groups are not connected.
On an individual level I love the attitude of reframing, which allows you to see parallel realities or the bigger picture. My philosopher friend Karim Benammar made reframing even his profession because he believes it is an attitude we need to deal with an increasingly complex world. It always makes me think of this video which so poignantly shows the helplessness of who remains within his own confined reality.
ALL THAT JAZZ
I’m fascinated with structures, systems and institutions that are meant to generate creativity, because usually the very nature of systems and man made structures is a remedy for the fear of the unknown. As children we reach a “genius level” of creativity when tested, but lose that along the way. But for children EVERYTHING is unknown, as my jazz hero Herbie Hancock says. How interesting. The less is known, the greater the creativity, is inherent to the idea of creating something new that is not known yet.
With my students I always try to find the things that SHOULD NOT be known before we start, or in the middle of a research and creation process. That question gives you direction and security as learning agent because you can safely let go of the worry about things you should not be planning..
EMERGING MOVEMENT
What do we need to learn to sense these movements and generate them like a Jazz musician?
London City
What if there is no central decision making that determines movement? What if there is no prescription of fixed movement? What if no one knows what the next move will be?
Stigmergy is a self-organisation principle by which the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it can even support efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.
Stellar Swarm
Remarkable!
ONE DAY A DREAM SCHOOL @ DA VINCI COLLEGE
February 28. What is the learning and working environment where you love to be and where you learn and work best? We went down to the VMBO Da Vinci College in Roosendaal where we lead a chaordic event to re-think and above all re-do the school with concrete self-organised initiatives of teachers, students, parents, companies, artists, creatives, the municipality and its mayor. Follow them on www.deidealeschool.nl
Photo’s by: Betul Ellialtioglu Seckin.
RE-CREATING UNIVERSITY LEARNING
The Learning Lab starts a new collaboratory at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies to create a new learning ecology with honours students of VU, UvA, and AUC, teachers and innovators. Very excited!
This Lab asks students, teachers, and the field to develop a vision and intervene in the system on what has become a trend in Higher Education: ‘learning to excel’. Few people asked students or even teachers about it, leave alone design in. Will the report of the Veerman commission on the future of higher education in the Netherlands remain a utopian vision? How can we make the still hollow phrase of “excellence in Higher Education” meaningful for us?
Over the past few years we have seen an explosion of experimentation as the open economy unfolded towards an ever more connected, self-organised co-creative network of people, organisation, initiatives, and processes. In life work and learning every individual’s role is rapidly confronted with new possibilities of connectivity, interactivity and collaboration. The things that drive the arts and knowledge economy cause profound changes in the texture of the social economic fabric. For example, sustainability has gone beyond a strategic imperative for energy efficiency and recycling to a fundamental design principle, affecting everything from the scientific research approach to workplace structures, mobility, personal health, and leadership. This creates new roles that support the ‘sustainable organisation.’ The same is true for health care, and will be true for education but until now the roles of students, teachers, and researchers have changed little since the enlightenment. How then are we to learn for excellence, if the excellence has been defined against standards and roles of roughly 200 years ago?
From the movie "Pioneers Lab" click to view