Inspiration and Might

Pondering the disarray, inequity and shifting sands of public education policy and practice, as well as stalemate, tensions between contrasting approaches, dwindling
funding and massive cutbacks in art education, I have to confront and challenge my own assumptions, cynicism and desire for retreat in despairing times. How about you?

Sources I call on regularly for inspiration and might (in addition to my colleagues working with the Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership in the Bay Area) include:

1. Margaret Wheatly’s book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World where she mines quantum physics, self-organizing systems, and chaos theory to challenge our thinking about observation and perception, participation and relationships, and the influences and connections that work across large and complex systems. This enlightening book discusses ideas from biology and chemistry about living systems and the creative role of disequilibrium in transformation and change, inspiring hope and patience. Wheately contrasts old Newtonian ideas of cause/effect thinking with counter-intuitive nonlinear logic and discusses the value of remaining open, fostering new leadership, cultivating relationships, networks and dialogue within and across diverse communities of practice in order to create the conditions from which change will emerge.

2. Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema and Kimberly Sheridan’s book Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education that identify teaching structures and habits of mind that the arts cultivate and that are being utilized in a diversity of ways to advance teaching and learning in and through the arts.

3. Olivia Gude’s Principles of Possibility and the UIC Spiral Art Education website:

What about you? What are your discoveries, sources of inspiration and/or resources for advancing positive social change and approaches to transformative education that employ the arts?