Directions of Growth: Methods of Design

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Directions of Growth Methods of Design
Roxanne R. Reed

John J. Cimino, Jr.
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The Da Vinci Node

• ."All our knowledge has its origins in our
  perception."
• "Everything is connected to everything else."
• Leonardo Da Vinci

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Perception

• The Illusionist
• Learning the world with this most excellent
  trickster
• Experiencing it for ourselves, feeling and
  knowing it in our own bodies
• Reflection

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Corsons InletA. R. Ammons

• A reading

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The Call
Waking up to the enormity of the challenge and
to the adequacy of our own generativity and
genius, if we can but listen to and honor the
calling moment by moment. Teaching is nothing
less than the inner work of a lifetime, a love
affair with life itself, both beyond subject and
intimate with subject. Authentic teaching has to
be an ongoing relational process, a process of
exquisite and wide ranging attention refining
teacher and student the student in the teacher
and the teacher in the student in the flames of
solitary and collective inquiry and in courageous
commitment to seeing, knowing, sharing and
belonging, in a word, to truth. Jon Kabat-Zinn
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The Call

• Come, my way, my truth, my life
• Such a way as gives us breath
• Such a truth as mends all strife
• Such a life as killeth death.
• Come, my light, my feast, my strength
• Such a light as shows a feast
• Such a feast as mends in length
• Such a strength as makes his guest.
• Come, my joy, my love, my heart
• Such a joy as none can move
• Such a love as none can part
• Such a heart as joys in love.
• George Herbert (text)
• R. Vaugn Williams (music)

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The Courage To Teach

• What is your own nature as a teacher?
• What are your special gifts and preferred
  techniques?
• Listening in to the conversation with our inner
  teacher whats going on?
• Befriending ourselves
• Owning our fears our own, our students?
• Generativity, honesty and staying in the game
• Paradoxes the tensions, the rewards, the
  strategies?
• Shifting levels, opening to something larger,
  love and suffering
• Living the questions and contradictions, living
  everything

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Ideas, Beliefs and Integrities

• Ideas concepts and notions which we use and, for
  the most part, also understand, in daily life.

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Ideas ? Beliefs Integrities

• Ideas concepts and notions which we use and, for
  the most part, also understand, in daily life.
• Beliefs ideas we hold close to us and declare to
  be true and important.

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Ideas ? Beliefs ? Integrities

• Ideas concepts and notions which we use and, for
  the most part, also understand, in daily life.
• Beliefs ideas we hold close to us and declare to
  be true and important.
• Integrities ideas we hold so close to us, we are
  no longer consciously aware of them. They have
  become part of us. They are who we are. They
  are our integrities.

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Ideas ? Beliefs ? Integrities

• Ideas concepts and notions which we use and, for
  the most part, also understand, in daily life.
• Beliefs ideas we hold close to us and declare to
  be true and important.
• Integrities ideas we hold so close to us, we are
  no longer consciously aware of them. They have
  become part of us. They are who we are. They
  are our integrities.
• Our personal growth is a movement toward
  integrity.
• We live, and only truly live, through our
  integrities.

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Ideas, Beliefs and Integrities

• Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when
  someone else does the thinking.
• Dare to be naive.
• R. Buckminster Fuller

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Ideas, Beliefs and Integrities

• When I'm working on a problem, I never think
  about beauty. I think only how to solve the
  problem. But when I have finished, if the
  solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
• Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to
  step out of it.
• R. Buckminster Fuller

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Ideas, Beliefs and Integrities

• A lot of people think or believe or know they
  feel (experience) -- but that's thinking or
  believing or knowing not feeling (experiencing).
  Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or
  know, but not a single human being can be taught
  to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you
  think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of
  other people but the moment you feel
  (experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be
  nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing
  its best, night and day, to make you everybody
  else -- means to fight the hardest battle which
  any human being can fight and never stop
  fighting.
• R. Buckminster Fuller

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Ideas, Beliefs and Integrities

• Everything you've learned in school as "obvious"
  becomes less and less obvious as you begin to
  study the universe. For example, there are no
  solids in the universe. There's not even a
  suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute
  continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no
  straight lines.
• We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let
  go of things that aren't true. It's always
  better with the truth.
• R. Buckminster Fuller

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Architecture Quiz

• Answers
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• Le Corbusier
• Robert Venturi
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Johann Wolgang von Goethe
• Gustave Eiffel
• (?)

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An Activity

• Raising the Bar
• Lowering the Rod

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When art works, plays the thing

• Serious play, deep play
• Learning by Surprise
• Indirect Transfer
• Peripheral Learning
• What we learn when we think were learning about
  something else or not learning at all
• The creation of something new is not
  accomplished by the intellect but by the play
  instinct acting from inner necessity. The
  creative mind plays with the object it loves.
• Carl Jung
• Life is the game that must be played
• Edwin Arlington Robinson,
• Ballade by the Fire

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Thought Paths A Review

• Sequence matters
• Logic
• Layers
• Lenses
• Fireworks
• Thought path legacies
• Inducing Multiple paths

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Exploration by induction What common element or
explanatory principle underlies all the items
below?
What I Tell You Two Times Is True
John
J. Cimino, Jr.
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Exploration by induction What common element or
explanatory principle underlies all the items
below?
What I Tell You Two Times Is True
John
J. Cimino, Jr.
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Research Mental Processes and the Arts
The Mind Processes of the Arts Elliott Eisner
The Aesthetic Competencies of
Leadership Center for Creative Leadership
Aims and Objectives of Arts Education Elliott
Eisner
Human Universals Creative Leaps International
Habits of Mind Costa and Kallick (ASCD)

• Which arts-based mental processes do you identify
  with most? Which processes do you consider among
  your strengths?
• Which other processes, not currently particular
  strengths for you, would you most wish to develop
  further?
• Which processes do you feel are most essential or
  most advantageous in your particular field, i.e.,
  most valuable for your students to develop?

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Mind Processes of the Arts

• Qualitative relationships in the absence of rules
• Acting flexibly with purpose to approach a goal
• Learning to explore possibilities within a medium
• Using imagination to see multiple perspectives
• Learning to pay attention to nuance
• Surrendering to processes rather than leading
• Learning to use language figuratively
• Creating emotionally what cannot be expressed
  literally
• The qualitative features of the arts and the
  world
• Eliot Eisner

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Creative Competencies of Leadership

• Noticing slowing down, taking in more
• Subtle representation eye for detail
  relationship
• Fluid perspective - attuned to multiple points of
  view
• Using R-mode non-verbal, intuitive processing
• Personalizing work arts interests spill into
  work
• Skeptical inquiry preserving the questions
• Serious play learning and exploring without
  rules
• Portraying paradoxes, conflicts, unknown
  mystery
• Facility with metaphor generative thinking
• Making shared meanings - engaging creative
  tensions
• Center for Creative Leadership

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Arts-Based Human Universals

• Engaging emotion as an integrator of deep
  learning
• Capacity for peripheral learning, valuing
  periphery
• Translating the universal as personal seeing
  the personal in the universal
• Working with multiple levels of meaning,
  different frames of reference and other logics
• Creating affirmative thinking environments where
  something different feels possible learning
  fields
• Composing and transmitting life a sense of
  self-authorship, recognizing we transmit who we
  are
• Creative Leaps International

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To Think As Nature Thinks

• Revisiting Corsons Inlet by A. R. Ammons
• Life Processes, Connectivity and Change in Nature
• Human Perception and Mind Processes
• Order, Disorder and Design in Nature
• Human Design, Vision and Architecture
• Still around the looser, wider forces work
• Mind and Nature A Necessary Unity by Gregory
  Bateson
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

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Ideas and Integrities

• To understand the great complexity of life, to
  understand what the universe is doing, the first
  word to learn is synergy. Synergy is the
  behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the
  behavior of their parts. Synergy holds our whole
  universe together.
• Unity is plural and at minimum two.
• R. Buckminster Fuller

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Design Assignment

• Design a module of instruction from core content
  in your field (or from your envisioned new course
  material) enriched with interdisciplinary design
  elements and multiple, arts-based approaches to
  teaching and learning. Give free reign your
  creative intuitions, experiment at the boundaries
  of your comfort zones, and generate at least two
  iterations of your design reflecting alternate
  thought paths through your content.
• Keep in mind a few of our basic design
  principles double description metaphors as
  bridges to new imagery and new thought paths
  intersections of disciplines and cultures as hot
  spots for new thinking arts experiences to
  engage emotion, imagination and the senses be
  mindful of perceptions physiological thresholds
  for change try to embed an aspect of the
  learning in the bodys own systems optimize your
  strategy - use multiple metaphors/descriptions to
  trigger depth perspectives and a 3-D mental
  gestalt.
• When youve completed a first draft, look for the
  resonances in your design, the thematic elements
  that recur at different levels and different
  scales (like architectural design elements).
  Decide if your design is beautiful and
  satisfying to your own inner teacher. (see quote
  by Bucky Fuller below) Are you playing to your
  authentic teaching strengths, your true identity
  and integrity as a teacher?
• Lastly, check in with your personalized list of
  essential arts-based mental processes. Are at
  least a few of these key thought processes
  sufficiently embedded in the experience youve
  designed? Does it ring true as deeply
  significant learning?

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• Unless the eye catch fire
• the god will not be seen.
• Unless the ear catch fire
• the god will not be heard.
• Unless the tongue catch fire
• the god will not be named.
• Unless the heart catch fire
• the god will not be loved.
• Unless the mind catch fire
• the god will not be known.

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Alternate Assignments

• Use an art form to animate, deepen or broaden the
  exploration of a key idea in your specialty.
• Choose a metaphor to illustrate or expand the
  essence of an idea from your specialty. Do it
  again with two other metaphors until you are
  satisfied (improvise a multi-dimensional
  gestalt).
• Analyze the Concert of Ideas by Creative Leaps
• Thought path analysis
• Analysis for resonances in design
• Catalogue Arts-based mental processes
• Describe the art forms and modalities of
  communication
• Engagement and Idea Content

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Ideas and Integrities
In our world, the arts are no longer some
parallel experience you have along the way, but
rather a powerful source of insight and
transformation feeding directly into the
thinking, feeling and acting of daily life full
of possibility, truth and optimism. In our world,
music is never just music. It is revolutionary.
It is the sound of ideas.
John J. Cimino, Jr.
Creative Leaps International