The Introduction to Our New Book!!!! “Unwritten” The Story of a Living System

Tonight from Pittsburgh, Michael and I have outlined and thought of the title and so much of the content!! Some of it will be a surprise… but we are going to share the process with you as move through the writing of a story written by all of our hands!!!!!

“Unwritten” The Story of a Living System

Umbutu-“I am because you are”

We cannot remember a more chaotic and tenuous time in our nation’s educational story. We are closing and opening schools, increasing the amount and intensity of standardized tests, changing education standards, and evaluating individuals with-in a system that is functioning like a machine. The challenge is: the current system is really not a machine, it is a network of human beings who feel, think, behave, and function with-in a human system that is alive. This living system of sentient beings are neuro-biologically wired to feel first; to think, to love, to connect, and to experience deep joy as well as deep pain. This system is wired to thrive, even through difficult times.
We are not there! We have lost our way through the primordial landscape of our innate purpose and genius. Deep learning is profoundly relational and connection to one another is a prerequisite for our collective emotional, social, spiritual and cognitive growth and development.
Our current story is rooted in scarcity and deficiency. This mindset leads to a prescriptive standardized process and structure of schooling that strikingly looks and feels the same all over America! Many of our children are not learning in this environment and even more frightening we are witnessing an ever increasing tendency toward violence in our children. Our children are literally killing each other at younger and younger ages.
Programs do not change people. People change people. It is critical to remember that the schools we are working in consist of webs of relationships. The schools we work in are alive! Transformation within any living system cannot be externally mandated or directed. It can only be provoked. If we are to intimately connect to the hearts and minds of one another, change must come from within; from within the landscape of our own beating hearts and the ever changing cascade of thought processes we encounter each day, several times a day.
Learning is the most natural and creative thing that human beings do, yet with-in our current story of schooling this natural process is deeply distorted and often those we wish to teach choose not to learn from us. Our current story of schooling is rooted in fixing and remediating our young.
Deep learning in human beings is profoundly relational. Close connections and attachment to supportive adults is a prerequisite to learning from them.
Michael and I hope to disturb your thinking gently; gently enough to have you consider that your role as an educator is moving in a new direction, inside a story that embraces the teaching and learning process as organically alive, that inhales and exhales, that moves and grows, within an adaptive messy context of a living system.
So please, join Michael and me in dialogue as we question, remember, strategize, and rewrite the story. The story of a living system that knows compassion, that feels the joys and suffering of humankind, but often times, loses its way in an industrial robotic environment where people are unable to thrive!