Be a builder or be a leader?

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to lead Summa Institute. What does it mean to be an Exeuctive Director? What am I trying to do? What do I want to inspire and how do I do that?

Recently I attended two education conferences, the NW Holistic Education Conference on Orcas Island at Salmonberry School and the AERO conference in Portland. At both conferences I met amazing people doing incredible things and I began to think about my role and what I am trying to do with Summa Institute. I began to deeply participate in the question that drives this blog. And an idea took root and has been growing in me over the last few weeks. It is this: I am not leading, I am building. I am a bridge builder. A bridge is built by first seeing a need (we have to have a way of crossing this body of water – and not by boat); then a plan for the bridge is created, what kind of bride is it?; when it comes time to build the bridge, one side is fixed and the other side is variable (you never know exactly where the bridge will land on the other side until you start to build it).

The need: a fundamental change in the way people relate to themselves and the other people in their lives. A need to be in relationship to consciousness, to allow it’s un-obstructed manifestation through each of us, as each of us.

The bridge: is NLR, no question.

I recently became a part of a really interesting group of people at Cooperative Catalyst (this is related, I promise). This group of people have come together to “change education as we speak”, sounds like what I want to do. While reading a post there I came across this post reference and I was struck, he said: “Here's the problem in a nutshell. What leaders "lead" are yesterday's organizations. But yesterday's organizations are broken. Today's biggest human challenge isn't leading broken organizations slightly better. It's building better organizations in the first place. It isn't about leadership: it's about "buildership", or what I often refer to as Constructivism. Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions.”

And so, my friends, I am coming to realize that I am not a leader, I am a builder, a builder of bridges. I am building a bridge from where we are today (a society in relationally confused hell), to one in which we care for our children and ourselves by being in relationship to consciousness, the way it is talked about here.

Baby steps

Okay, so by now most of you know that we are not in fact opening the Summa Academy this fall. Yes, that's right the building fell through, again. Why it has been so hard for us to find a building is something I am still struggling with. It just makes no sense to me, this is a city for crying out loud, isn't there one small building that is just right for us. Hell, at this point I would settle for mostly good. Alas, it is not here now, so we keep looking.

In the meantime, I have decided it is time to take an interim step, one that will get us a little closer to the ultimate goal of opening the Institute. We have an office, which is part of a wonderful space called the Warehouse (a project of Portland Green Parenting). Here we have a 300SF space that has room for small meetings, a play corner for my girls (now 5 & 2!) and a desk (with an enormous printer that my husband got donated) for me to "work" at. It is wonderful. I can come in with the girls and work while they play and there are so many great people who come through. The Warehouse houses a cafe, a community room (where we are holding parenting courses), Daisies and Dinos a children's resale shop, and Know Thy Food a bulk food buying coop. If you are ever in the hood, stop by, I am not holding regular business hours at the moment, but you might catch us on Tuesday afternoons. It feels great to have a space and I look forward to whatever comes next!

Oh and like us on facebook, if you have not done so already. http://www.facebook.com/summainstitute

Guest blog: Ba Luvmour on the Gardner fallacy

I have often struggled with the work of Howard Gardner and The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I sensed something amiss but I thought: “What’s not to like?” Each of us does have a blend of different intelligences. He rails against the stupidity of IQ tests and their brethren. Gardner even went as far as to point out that to dramatically emphasize verbal-linguistic skills and logical-mathematical skills at the expense of music, art, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills is cultural genocide. And living at the cutting edge I wanted to use Gardner’s Harvard pedigree to substantiate progressive education.

My primary locus for research is fieldwork. I used Multiple Intelligences in two ways. As the director of a small charter school I instituted several ways to apply the theory including learning stations, integrated curricula, and extensive teacher training. In whole family experiential learning programs we at Summa used a Multiple Intelligence analysis as part of our assessment in order to customize the program and optimize family well-being. I also referred to it positively in my book, Optimal Parenting.

But something always bothered me. I knew Gardner was a logical positivist and therefore of the old paradigm. But so were Piaget and others and I know there is much to preserve there. And that was my confusion. As I turned my attention to the comparison between the old and new paradigm I realized that Piaget’s work, like Natural Learning Relationships, is an epistemology. Gardner’s work is a theory.

The Fallacy

Then, due to the invitation from Paul Freedman, Josette and I met Kirsten Olson and her husband Richard Ellmore as we were guests and speakers at the Salmonberry School on Orcas Island. Kirsten’s delightfully frank comments on her experience and as a student and colleague of Gardner, and particularly the social uselessness of The Theory, catalyzed my understanding. Gardner is an interpreter, a statistician, a theorizer based on select data and spun into a thoughtful web.

But he knows nothing of epistemology. He knows nothing of how children know themselves and their world. Theorists crunch data (often with little concern for the biases of the person doing the crunching) and then superimpose their results on existing conditions.

Piaget called his work genetic epistemology. Though he used a logical positivist framework, he also often cited his experiences with children as validation. Unfortunately, due to the reductionist framework he failed to adequately address the social and emotional life of the child. He also ignored what Maslow called The Farther Reaches of Human Nature and the work of Jung and transpersonal psychologists.

Natural Learning Relationships, an ontological epistemology, includes all of these critical human qualities—spiritual, aesthetic, social, emotional, cognitive, and physical.

The Negative Consequences of The Theory

Multiple Intelligences is a theory and includes none of these qualities, not even those pioneered by Piaget. It does not account for social influences that draw forth certain intelligences while suppressing others. It says nothing about relationship between adult and student. Gardner does not take the time to attempt to correlate child development with the various intelligences.

Here’s the irony. While redressing inequities about the way society perceives intelligence, Gardner has created new and possibly more damaging inequities in the way children are known. Most telling, relationship and curriculum is still top-down, only now adults have The Theory as a new justification for their agenda. Appreciation of the critical organizing principles of the developmental stages of childhood including Rightful Place, Trust, Autonomy and Interconnectedness, which Gardner fails to do, cripples the value of his work.

Kirsten talks inspirationally about how school wounds children. I add theories unexamined in the light of the whole child.

Abandon the old paradigm. It hurts, wounds, and leads to boatloads of unnecessary suffering.