It’s been two weeks since EduCon 2012 and lots of posts have been put up since then.  I’ve postponed writing until the experience soaked in a bit more. The distance to Philadelphia that late Friday afternoon in January felt farther away from my country lane in Virginia than it would have if I’d left in the morning. However, I was late leaving because I’d been asked to speak at the funeral service of a former colleague. Along with a community of educators, we gathered to offer respect to one who fell from among us too soon. All other agendas were put on hold that day, including Educon.

When I left town late, I knew the 95N beltway battle to head above the Mason-Dixon line would take on a life of its own. I grabbed my navi – a survival necessity in my 21st c “possibles”  bag.

This year, the GPS became “Hal” as I merged into the streaming DC traffic that Friday afternoon. I knew I was in trouble when “he” directed me to exit  95N onto Pennsylvania Avenue. ”I’m not that stupid, Hal.  There’s no invite to visit from the POTUS in my inbox.” Then, “he” tried to convince me to take a side trip to Annapolis. What that was about? I had no clue why “he” was misleading me so far afield from the planned trip. In his soothing, but illogical, voice, “Hal” insisted I u-turn for miles beyond the Annapolis exit until I finally had the good sense to hit mute. “Dave” could have used that feature back in 2001.

Despite GPS problems, I continued on course up 95N wondering why I was bothering with  “Hal” anyway. Stuck with “Hal’s” dysfunction, I began to wonder if “Siri” would be a better option but, then again… . when I found this, I thought maybe not so much.

Wondering as a Starting Point:

In wondering about the learning impact of using navigation systems on human navigation skills, I tried to find a piece of research I’d read some time ago. I couldn’t find the original post, but did find something recent about how our navi-dependency causes us to lose the occasional homing pigeon sensibility we humans use. It caused me to wonder about the importance of those skills in the physical, social, and cognitive worlds we inhabit.

What does it mean to become dependent on today’s mobile devices that exercise place-finding skills on our behalf? What are we NOT learning when we choose to shove old paper maps into the recycling bin or abandon them to the back of a file drawer? What changed when paper maps became ubiquitous, replacing a set of skills that our ancestors considered essential? What did a few generations back think when their children made the move to ESSO road maps?

And, what changed when humans abandoned the dead reckoning and celestial navigation skills used by Lewis and Clark on their trip to near Portland, for example? If in the process of today’s generations abandoning yesterday’s lay map reading, what if the next generation doesn’t learn skills of physical navigation? What changes when the navigation process is fully abandoned to Hal and Siri? Should we worry about the learning implications of that?

Reflection as an Observation Point:

We sometimes forget that technologies have evolved for all time and, as a result, some human skills that once were important are no longer of the same value as to a prior generation. This was as true of life in the caves as of life in today’s 21st century skyscrapers. The evolution of technology sneaks up on the general population, often a surprise to the psyche. Like other generations we mostly resist letting go of the old and adopting the new.  It’s why I’m only half committed to using “Hal” when I travel. I don’t really trust in the GPS for both mystical and real life reasons. If I feel that –  and I’m pretty open to using new technologies – how does that play out in people who aren’t adopting or adapting to the rapid tech changes in every aspect of our lives- cars, homes, entertainment, medicine, education, government and … social media?

I sometimes hear, “what will society do, if all these computers fail?” Now that’s a good question, one that likely parallels the “yea, but”  thinking of monks in response to the printing press and buggy whip makers regarding the Model T. It’s a fact of life that turning points take time and the “imaginators” pushing the flywheels of change on those points often take hits on their journeys. They certainly have been on the receiving end of a lot more “yea buts’ than @djakes’ “what ifs” as they’ve pushed beyond the envelope of invention, travel, engineering, and mapping the world and beyond over the past few thousand years.

Arrival as a Point of Departure:

Somewhere in Philly

As I drove into Philly with just a bit of sun setting behind the city, I was reminded that I’ve learned to appreciate the concept of “city” from my son. In some ways, Twitter also has expanded my tolerance of city as I’ve formed virtual connections with folks from all over the world, many of whom live in and love their cities. When I hang out with people who represent diverse backgrounds and perspectives, I find myself trying out new ways of thinking.

I’m a country kid, but I’ve learned, within certain parameters, to find joy in cities. I like to look up and down (and yes, I know that act alone labels me to street people) to soak in intricate cornices of buildings, skyscraper reflections, signage over doorways, ancient wooden doors, steaming grates, and the wrought iron that often wraps around old churches.

I think about how people are kept out and in within cities. Paths and sidewalks funnel people to and from buildings. Country people learn to navigate differently than my city friends.

I’ve learned to wander the woods along my country lane, in swamps, up and down mountains, straddling fences, and navigate the way home using a downed poplar tree, a greenstone outcropping, the sun, or a path well traveled by deer. In Denver for a conference, I learned from walking with a city friend that urban and rural  kids grow up learning to navigate differently. I thought about how I mostly used a kind of dead reckoning as I took the risk to move alone to and from EduCon – albeit with the capability to phone @beckyfisher73, text Jeff the Educon concierge,  or access a navi app on my own phone.

In reflecting about my use of multiple navigation systems to travel to and from Philadelphia, I’ve thought about old tech, new tech, old strategy, new strategy, and my appreciation of the accessibility of all. I am a different navigator with my tools than my father was. He also became a different navigator from his  “three sees”   father.

EduCon 2.4 as a Learning Point:

I always learn when I’m with people of diverse experiences, capabilities, and interests. Educon and a few other conferences remind me of the old style tribal or mountain folk Rendezvous. EduCon attendees individually and through a variety of communities connect throughout the year, but value the coming together face to face with a full community. Just like our ancestors, we go to Philly to exchange ideas in the corridors and around the tables, break bread at local watering holes, share artifacts at session campfires, and cross-pollinate in conversation while we wait for sessions to begin and end. We share what’s in our “possibles” bags and take possibilities away with us when we leave.

This year, voices emerged from all over about the informal connections of conferences as having as much worth as formal activities such as keynotes and panels. They both offer opportunities through different pathways and that’s important to remember. There’s no right or wrong path to learning.

My navigation adventures in the city along planned, formal pathways led me to built, indeed structured, environments that challenged me to wonder and observe and ask questions about things I do not know.  At the same time, I value the informal trails of my Virginia mountains where I can wander on my own terms through a natural environment. The natural environment also holds different kinds of mysteries that push me to wonder, observe and question. While I am learning to use navigation tools and improve my skills in the city, I sustain my capability to move around in the woods. As a result, I am a better personal navigator today than twenty years ago.

In reflecting back on EduCon 2.4, my experiences remind me that our personal learning needs get met in different ways – sometimes formally and sometimes informally. We learn from both scenarios how to navigate through learning, life, and space.

 EduCon participants explore horizons. The role of explorer may seem pretty cool when we’re learning history but when you’re an explorer, the world you’re traveling through can feel pretty perilous. That emerged in some of the discussions among those attending Educon, both formally and informally. As a colleague reminded me recently, “the pioneers got the arrows, and the settlers got the land.”  EduCon participants struggle with navigating the unknowns of education’s frontiers just as those who pushed beyond boundaries always have. Coming together seems to renew the energy needed by boundary pushers in this “Age of Educational Exploration” whether it’s @chrislehmann in his ongoing leadership at SLA or @dancallahan in a new teaching position.In reflection, understanding navigation as a lifelong learning competency seems to be a take away for me from my Educon 2.4 journey. It wasn’t a session really but it was an underlying theme for me during  the weekend and since.

After all, isn’t this a big question for educators pushing into new territory and through old boundaries of the past:

How do we successfully navigate ourselves,  and those who explore and settle new frontiers of learning with us, into the coming decades of this century?

By the way, I turned “Hal” off on the way home. Enough said.

Are we born to create?  Does the drive to learn represent what it means to be human?

About twenty years ago, I began to think deeply about the relationship between creativity and learning, perhaps because of family and friends who represent a continuum of creative directions in their life pursuits. A recent article on the decline of creativity also caught my attention. Sir Ken Robinson examines this decline from a different perspective, describing it graphically as a school-induced “war on talent.”

My brother rejected a comfortable career to become an artisan knifemaker, learning instead to make a living by creating 18th century knives. I’ve watched him study the craft, the history, and knife design processes, adding his own creative spark in his journey to become a valued knifemaker in his field. I cherished the artist I found within my son before he turned three. Today, he’s immersed in the digital design revolution, pursuing an MFA along learning pathways I could never have envisioned twenty-one years ago. I’ve seen school kids motivated to engineer bridges from spaghetti, create 3-D fabrications, and work like cave painters from 30,000 years ago. What do they all have in common? In each case, they pursue passion-driven learning grounded in personal creativity as they:

wonder, question, play,

design, make, construct,

imagine, engineer, build,

originate ,compose, devise…

These verbs represent the legacy passed to us from ancestral cave painters, campfire storytellers, tool inventors, village songwriters, cathedral designers, and bridge builders. In reality, are we not all gifted with the DNA of poets, artists, painters, artisans, musicians, builders, designers, and inventors? What happens to our gifts?

When toddlers play, we marvel as those ancestral gifts come alive. Then, we watch as the contagious creativity of childhood fades away in most children as they march towards adulthood. Why did we choose to disconnect “to play” from “to create” from “to learn?”

Around 500 years ago when Gutenberg’s press led to a new world order, print information consumption became the driver of learning, rather than the sparks of the creative learning processes once so essential to the survival of hunter-gatherers.

Today, we’re caught in a tense turning point in which learning again seeks a creative identity. In the late 1800s, Charles Peirce defined wondering as the starting point for design, not observation. Rotman’s Roger Martin recently wrote to the critical need to embed not just deductive and inductive thinking in our design tool crib, but also Peirce’s notion of the great abductive leap from wonder into inquiry. DARPA’s created tech possibilities never before conceptualized. Several states talk about an index to assess how well schools support creativity within learning. And, the design ethos of Jobs resides on the best seller list. What are the implications for those of us on the turning point?

Are we reawakening in education, in business, in society, and even, government, to the essential relationship between creativity and learning?

Is it possible in a “democratized culture” of digital possibilities, that access to opportunities to create and learn will renew inventiveness? What if we kept alive the iridescent spark of creativity we’ve often extinguished in children who, as they’ve entered mostly factory schooling, are held in thrall by an obsolete, 20th century destiny of repetitive, assembly line school work? What if we allowed learning to emerge from our innate urge to create?  What might be different?

If we reconnect the power of creativity and learning, what are the implications for contemporary schooling? work? life at home?

How might our world change as a result?

Join @irasocol and me at 9 a.m. EST on February 11 during #ideachat to converse about creativity and learning.

Bashing public education has become a national sport for media and politicians who compete 24/7 for public market share. While our public education system certainly has room for improvement across multiple factors, we continue to educate far more of our young people for more school years than either India or China. Our best students may not be as academically driven as South Korea’s best or as academically successful as the Finns, but overall our young people are far less self-abusive teenagers. Our young women today have far more educational and career opportunities than their peers in Japan, the Middle East or on the African continent. Children who enter the United States from third world countries are better served in our Statue of Liberty Schools than in their own countries. We are dedicated to including, not excluding, special needs and immigrant children in our regular school communities and to keeping learning doors open rather than closed.

11. America’s dreamers created the reality that all young people, regardless of class, gender, race, ethnicity or religion are afforded the right to a free, public education. This gift, I do not take for granted.

Slammed

Surfing channels, I discovered young teens, children really, garbed in the uniform of the ghetto pitching their poetry into the audience at the 2010 National Slam Poetry Teen Championships. There’s an irony in that the perfect words of Slam poetry get rewarded on TV and punished in the hallways of schools. I turned away from their images, HBOed into fifteen minutes of fame, and with eyes closed, absorbed these young poets’ spoken words of fear, anger, love, respect. They didn’t spout poetry about unicorns or rainbows but rather a poetry of life on the edge where mothers shoot smack and let their children starve while the Sunday TV preacher asks for donations to congregational causes that keep the preacher in a Cadillac and the right people in office.

I am renewed by the fresh images captured in the spaces for learning that these young poets seek and find inside and outside the school zone. Young people bear gifts for those who look beyond the filtering system we apply to them. They refuse to be invisible in a world that expects them to be. Poets live in all our classrooms. We simply need to shut out the noise and listen for them.

Just hands.

Imagine learning from hands that move in syncopated rhythm across the front of the A-Bomb Dome as they tell a family story of Hiroshima, a father lost for all time with only the lock for his bicycle and his gold molar found. I learned about projection artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, Director of the Center for Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, from my son who is inspired by his work. Jason, a lover of moving image, tells me that projection art provides a different venue in which to learn, a different space to challenge one’s understanding. He shared a video to illustrate the power of projection art as a tool for learning, to help me grasp his own learning work as well as to explore a different entry point into learning outside the traditional boundaries of how we define education.

The bombing of Hiroshima touched lives of the innocent just as the attack, according to American military history, prevented the deaths of American soldiers trying to end WWII in the Pacific Theater. After watching the video documentary about the creation of Wodiczko’s project, I was caught by the power and passion of an artist to present the tension of multiple stories that evolve into differing interpretations of history.

Image has been used by humans since the beginning to tell the stories of our lives, stories that once past become our history.  The stories told through the projected hands of bombing survivors demonstrate how technology creates a different version of rock paintings in the 21st century. I wonder why we continue to value the screed of our classrooms when there are so many intriguing and interesting entry points for our children to use to access the narrative of learning.

The English Patient

The English Patient has become over the years a museum of art to me, each image forming the portrait, the landscape, the poetry, and narrative of man and woman. Doorways and windows frame perfect oil paintings, a chance encounter with light cast just so to create one more scene for the artist to render into a setting. His brush strokes capture the nuances of sun on a kiss, the silvered pitcher caught on the edge of a tub, angled shadowing of window bars.

When I watched The English Patient this time over break, I was struck that technology simply allows creators a more varied palette of colors from which to choose. But, art springs from the soul, not from the technology.  An artist must see ahead of the brush, the camera lenses, the screen to capture that which will move the audience. The English Patient represents an ecosystem of artistry at work; cinematography, score, narration, setting of scenes, dialogue. In my opinion, it may be one of the most painfully perfect films ever made, not because of the technology that allowed it to become a movie, but because of the capability of humans to make visible to others what they otherwise would not see.

In our lives as educators, we learn to filter others, to render some things invisible. The English Patient gives me pause to consider our capabilities to see each frame of the school day as an opportunity to create, to make visible that which we now filter, to activate a camera bag of lenses in our work. The technology at our fingertips can expand visibility, but it can’t force us to see.

Noise

Over this break, I have considered noise, listened to it unfold on channels that never cease pouring trivia of the world into our lives in a circadian rhythm of news and reality shows by which we tell time. I’ve also watched the noise we create on a social media path of circular logic along which we tell and retell the same arguments for and against just about everything.

As I sought silence along the edges of a town that sits on white sand, sand which lingered for millions of years under Jurassic ocean waters, I thought about the learning evolution of humans from image to oral story to pressed print to screen to search to image to story.  The whisper of a teen poet on HBO, the ghostly hands of Hiroshima, and each perfect frame of The English Patient reminds me that when I subtract the noise, I rediscover the value of the silent, reflective pause as critical in the cycle of learning. That was the gift of this break.

Instead of flooding the earth with more rain, the sky was flooded with the perfect blue of a high-pressure system. Light breezes rocked tulip poplars, white oaks, and sycamores in the nearby woods. It was a day for meandering deep into the hollow, and through a field of thigh-high broom sage, now August-worn.

I am reminded of the Last Child in the Woods when I wander. This summer, an owner of an “ice cream” van who wandered neighborhoods in search of children shared with me there were no longer children at play in yards, or tree houses, or on the sidewalks.  She found that her ringtone horn brought no one clamoring for a rocket pop to the sidewalk unless pre-arranged for a birthday party.  “Where are the children?” she asked.

When I walked the fields, woods, unpaved roads, and backyard today, I was reminded why I still love the seeking of undiscovered possibilities of the natural environment, and why there never should be a last child in the woods.

water's edge

It seems as if just yesterday, I was such a child wandering the fields, woods, and swamps of the low country, caught by the sun filtering through Spanish moss and the scream of the Pileated Woodpecker flitting from Cypress tree to live oak. Such meandering uncovered an afternoon of I-Search moments for me in my childhood yesterdays, and for me again today. What was the raccoon – if it was a raccoon – hunting last night at the water’s edge?

Terrapene carolina

Or, why did the Eastern box turtle, a study in slow locomotion, get motivated to cross a gravel road?

In the garden, a Snowberry Clearwing moth allowed me to slide close enough to capture its image while it hovered a whisper above the blooms of a butterfly bush.

How could I not wonder what secrets its evolution holds, this moth that so closely mimics the hummingbird?

Snowberry Clearwing

This perfection of a blue-sky day led me up a well-washed gravel road, one once traveled by natives, colonials, revolutionists, presidents, citizen-soldiers in blue and grey, farmers’ families, country doctors, hunters, and now the occasional mountain biker.  I imagined what it would be like to stream together the generations of inhabitants and wanderers who have traveled into this hollow and over the sagging mountain for which the road is named. What questions would we have for each other? We might ask, what led us here? What do we share?

the gap road

There’s patience to be learned in the natural world that I inhabited today. I stood in a roadbed with a bank that extends 10 feet over my head. How long did it take to wear the soil down until a vein of quartz now lies exposed? And, what about the rounded chain of mountains through which I walk? How much time needed to pass for them to become great-grandfather mountains, unlike the mere youth of today’s spiked Rockies?

Virginia Day Flower

I’ve been led outdoors over a lifetime to find things that I otherwise would not know. I am drawn to a palette of watchet-blue of Virginia Day Flowers and the purple of thistles to which tiger swallowtails cling. On this day, amidst a brushing together of leaves in the slight breeze and an occasional cacophony of cicadas, there is much that remains silent- no planes overhead, their flights grounded by the hurricane.

Thistle Bank

In remembering the conversation with the ice-cream van entrepreneur, I am reminded today of silent children who spend their moments mostly inside the built environment, removed from the wonders of backyards, sidewalks, fields, woods, and ponds – and I consider what they’ve lost.

I found myself needing to be on a plane very soon after the leadership panel in which I was a panel member was scheduled to end. Luckily, a school in my district is located near the airport so I could leave on the “fly” to catch a plane and have a quiet space with good connectivity. Being there also gave me an opportunity to have two principals who I regard sit in and listen so they could share feedback and thoughts at the end of the session. They both said it was just remarkable to be in the room with a panelist who was co-presenting with panelists from all over the United States, and none of us in the room together.  I learned from our post panel conversation that I take for granted other leaders with whom I work are knowledgeable about the full range of professional learning opportunities available. Neither of these principals would have been connected with RSCon3 if I’d not asked them to be there.

It strikes me that despite the large numbers of participants in RSCON3, we still have a huge swath of educators, many of whom who are ready and willing, who don’t know about possibilities to engage online in interesting dialogue and up close and personal connections with colleagues. I think we have to really focus on how we encourage and promote accessibility as well as make it an alternative that counts as professional development. I heard a teacher say recently that she had learned of all kinds of resources on twitter – links and people- that she’d never have found otherwise by interacting inside the system. She wondered why her peers aren’t interested. While there are many reasons for that, I also think that many teachers are unaware of how to receive professional development credit for participation or what those options even are. They aren’t knowledgeable they can still go back to RSCON3 and participate in session after session via Elluminate. They aren’t in the loop on what is available.

#RSCON3 provided boundary spanning learning opportunities. From the keynoters that included some of the most innovating educators in our business to workshop presenters who provided the “why, what, and how”, we couldn’t have asked for a more differentiated and accessible set of conference opportunities for educators.

Now, we just have to figure out how to engage more educators in becoming a part of the learning network.

And, thank you, Shelly for dreaming RSCON into reality!

learning around the table

I walked into a gathering of leaders this past Tuesday and wondered what we would accomplish together this year to make vision words real for young people.

“All learners believe in their power to embrace learning, excel, and own their future.”

We’re embarking on the next stage of our journey as a team of leaders- teachers and administrators working together outside hierarchy. It seemed appropriate to meet in the learning studio of the UVA Medical School where staff has tossed out 100 years of medical education curriculum and instruction to radically innovate a new design for learning. What better place to focus our own creativity than in a new learning space that’s defied being a lecture in a box by becoming a space for team-based learning in the round?

We K-12 educators came together to “Connect Our Dots” in the work we lead together to ensure learners receive the support they need in every learning space and from every employee.  We’re all on the same team and we need each other to accomplish the hard but rewarding work of public education. We need each other to sustain optimism in the face of significant challenge. We are nothing because of our rhetoric. We are everything because of our actions. We are not schools or central office. We are strong because of all of us, not because of any one of us.

The phrase, irresistible learning, was on my mind as our team planned the 2011-12 “advance” work, a phrase borrowed from teacher leader @corriekelly who has blogged about irresistible literacy. 

Irresistible learning comes from a keen focus on what we do to build positive relationships, create relevant learning work, and design attainable challenges that engage learners’ interest, curiosity, and thought. In a performance conversation last year, a principal described it well, “I want kids to continue to engage after they leave a class. They scratch their heads. They go home and they can’t stop thinking about what they’re learning. They want to do more. I don’t want them to walk out and leave their learning behind.”

This phrase irresistible learning is relevant to our own learning as well as to the young people we serve. Everyone in the round learning space we occupied last week needs to keep coming back to thinking about the dots we’re connecting, to their own plans to lead with others to make connections, and to actions they’ll take to lead our work forward.  This team’s work is about what we accomplish together, rather than as individuals in isolation of each other. We can’t make those vision words real without working together,  being open to new ideas that transform our thinking.

"team time's when the real learning begins"

We sat at round tables together and talked a lot about the challenges of making changes in our work. A medical student spoke to our team saying that it’s only when the med students tear into their team-based learning projects that “the real learning starts.” He said, “ If you need tables, buy round ones. That’s how we see each other’s eyes when we’re working together.” Another, who grew up in an urban setting, said to me last spring, ”If medical students who are top 1%ers need this kind of learning space, technology, curriculum, and teaching to make learning relevant, why in the world would we deny the same to kids who struggle in school?’

As a result of advances in technology, we exist in a turning point in which changes in our world allow learning opportunities that have never before existed. This round room is well equipped with state of the moment technology. The medical school faculty used technology and space changes to shift pedagogy to support team-based, active learning.  We have a similar opportunity in Pk-12 education but are our educators ready to make changes that create new possibilities? Are our communities?

Who's Board Is It?

What story will we unfold as a result of adding new technologies to the work of learners? Will we simply tell the same story we’ve always told in our classes or will we create new learning stories? Will learners tell the same stories about us or will they change their stories? How do we as leaders give our learners a reason to change the stories they tell about us? Will we embrace learning? Will we excel? Will we own our future?

I just heard the former CEO of Jaguar America say the work they did to move from last place in 1990 to first place in 1998 as the luxury car of choice in America was not about management by visible numbers, merit pay, slogans, compliance-driven hierarchies, or firing people. He said it was about driving fear from the workplace, creating a culture of ownership for quality work, engaging employees in process improvements, and building team.

The global world at our doorsteps represents a world of diverse communities and economies. Our students need us to help them be ready to be successful in that world, to be happy in that world, to be a contributor to that world. The culture we create in our schools and departments must support our work towards this. How do we as leaders lead to change culture? Does that begin with changing how we lead? How we fashion our own stories of values in a time of uncertainty? What we choose to do when the right answer isn’t on our own test of leadership?

In this decade, pedagogy, learning spaces, and learning technologies will either be shifted to create a new story of contemporary learning or we will simply continue to tell the same story.  We educators- teachers and administrators- together hold the pen in our hands.

Will it be the same story of education in the box, easy to tell because we know it so well?  Or, will it be a version of the moon speech story of John F. Kennedy, “we go to the moon, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”

Which story will we choose to write?

Children dream different dreams than their parents. I discovered this early in the life of my son. The challenge for me as a young parent emerged in the letting go of what I valued as possibilities as I came to realize my son was capable of creating his own possibilities.  I’d always thought of myself as a successful teacher, but I began to understand that the work I needed to do really well as a parent was about standing aside more often than not. Figuring that out as a parent helped me become, I believe, a better educator of other parents’ children.

I know it’s also allowed my son to venture beyond boundaries and horizons that might have held him hostage otherwise.

I should have known when he was four that he wasn’t destined to belong to the country.  We walked one day under a canopy of oaks high above the brush-deep field. I can remember the dapple of light and shadow on rocks hugging an ancient path to the top of the mountain; the smell of decaying leaves and the cough of a crow reverberating in the distance. He was less than entranced with it all. When we paced our way back to the field, he asked, “So why would a person want to walk in the woods anyway?”

I’ve never known a country kid so comfortable on his own in cities- traveling through Paris, Madrid, London, Rome, Mexico City, Athens, New York, LA – it didn’t matter, he just dropped into spaces as if he was born to streets not to rolling hills.  When he chose to stay near home in college, no one was more surprised than me.

At ten, he asked for a shower curtain stamped with a map of New York subways and a street map for his room.  His first laptop in high school ran a banner with a recurring stream of three letters … NYU… NYU… NYU. When he selected an AP studio art portfolio theme centered on architectural elements of the city, we sent him off to gather images.

I’ve always known it was just a matter of time before this world became his world – and time came due this past Friday.

I have to say that the global network we call the Internet has some responsibility for his ease of movement within cities. As he says, his phone means he’s just a text away from a friend, information he needs to negotiate and navigate uncharted streets, and me.  It makes me feel better knowing that the tech tools we have today are available to my son as he transitions into becoming a city dweller. I feel closer to him, too.

As a parent who loves the country, was raised in the country, and lives in the country, I’ve done a lot of suppressing of urges to behave over my son’s love of the city. My attitude of “why would anyone want to live in the city?” has changed as I’ve observed cities through the eyes of my son. I’ve bought picture books, coffee table books, city guides, and maps- and that shower curtain – for him. He’s collected coffee mugs from various cities, 20^th century black and white posters of NYC, and the feel, smells, tastes, sounds, and imagery of cities everywhere. When I was lost in a London tube with no idea of how to be found, he found me.  In Paris and Rome and Barcelona, he interpreted our movement through restaurants and museums and street scenes with ease. When I’m baffled by turnstiles in city subways everywhere, he helps me overcome my lack of spatial intelligence so I’m not always stuck on the wrong side of where I need to be.

I will never be comfortable in my own skin in a city. I need to be able to see the sky without a multi-story building obscuring the view. Walking in a forest sans the cacophony of taxis and emergency vehicles always feels safer than venturing deep into Olmsted’s well planned Central Park woodlands.

However, I’ve also learned to appreciate cities from my son. He views cities as places of delight; intersections of rich cultures and an artistry of space.

I’ve grown up as a parent while observing my millennial grow into an adult. I feel he’s learned some important life lessons from me, but I’ve also learned many critical lessons from him as well. I learned the power of Skype when he lived in Valencia, Spain. I learned don’t call, just text when he spent time in Mexico City. And, I learned to experience, not reject, buildings, people, sidewalks, dogs, parks, graffiti, museums, sounds, smells, and the sky of cities.

I do trust NYC to take care of my son in his new life there.

But, I admit I still had to ask if he had his credit card number and some cash stashed somewhere other than in his wallet.

 After all, what’s a mother for?

* 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th, 8th (J’s work)

Abigail Adams

“If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me, and accuse me of vanity, but you I know have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the Sentiment. If much depends as is allowed upon the early Education of youth and the first principals which are instill’d take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women. “
— Abigail Adams (The Letters of John and Abigail Adams)

July 4, 1776 Independence Day

August 18, 1920 Nineteenth Amendment

June 23, 1972 Title IX Educational Amendments

I just finished a Newsweek article truth-speaking the notion that our forefathers (mothers just don’t get the press coverage they deserve this time of year) were no angels. They, in fact, exhibited many, if not all, of the same foibles, appetites for peccadilloes, and falls from grace which current politicians do.  They gamed, chased women, wasted money, and settled conflicts occasionally by taking turns at shooting each other. They also forgot to include a few people in their effort to craft concepts of democratic freedoms and rights for the citizenry of a young nation in the making.

Surely more than a few women of those times must have sat in candlelight and contemplating the actions of the elite politicos of the era, asked the question “what are they thinking?” Living in central Virginia on a beeline between Jefferson’s Monticello and Madison’s Montpelier.  I wonder the same tonight.

Mr. Jefferson

In reflecting upon July 4, 2011, I am reminded that since our nation began, we’ve  lived with and through the imperfections of our forefathers. One of those imperfections was a lack of recognition that they left their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters, representing half of the young nation, out of the “let freedom ring” equation. I guess the men fancied only they could be in charge.

I question how soon it will be before we elect a competent female president. The nation abounds with capable women.  In life before Title IX,  college-educated women found careers of nursing or teaching as the work pathways most open to them (I also remember the not so funny joke about women going to college to get a MRS degree.) Then, Title IX became reality and women began to play almost any sport and choose just about any career – other than teaching or nursing.

Today, there’s no job that prepares a man for the presidency that a women hasn’t done.  My generation of women won’t likely generate a presidential candidate, but the one just behind us certainly can. After all, groundwork’s been laid by women going back to Abigail Adams  whose voice as a patriot helped shape America’s independence. Adams was no lightweight thinker and her writing has influenced Suffragists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries as well as the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Recently, I had the chance to watch a young girl, probably about eight, challenge a tough climbing wall at the top of the Rockies. She went through a process of climb, pause, reflect, consider, and move forward. She represents generations of women who’ve led to those who today demonstrate fearlessness on the climbing wall of any career they choose to pursue.  I watched her climb and then silently cheered when she reached the top of the wall. She didn’t know that once upon a time girls lived in an America that blocked them from playing certain sports, pursuing certain careers, voting, and running for office. She just knew on a blue-sky day that she could climb as high as her dreams could take her.

I like to imagine that some of our forefathers awoke in the middle of the night and at least considered America’s daughters, not just sons, as they created a pathway to independence. On the other hand, perhaps they just couldn’t think that far out of the box for anyone other than themselves. Because of their mindlessness in how they saw women, we females ended up waiting until 1920 to obtain the right to vote and 1972 to get the chance to climb other walls from which we’d been blocked.

As we celebrate America’s independence, I think the best of who we are represents our hard work as a nation to evolve the concepts of independence – freedom- responsibility. To do so demands that we not limit “we the people” who inhabit our nation from climbing any wall any of us choose to conquer.  In the beginning we limited talent in this nation because our forefathers restricted the range of those they saw as having potential. Thankfully, the foresight of those who formed our nation created a Constitutional pathway to make right that which they did not see.

America’s many Independence Days affirm our current need to educate all young people to choose from the best learning hand and footholds available. We need all of our children – regardless of who they are – to reach their potential to climb anywhere. That’s how a woman finally will sit in the Oval Office rather than find herself donating a First Lady’s dress to the Smithsonian.

And, that’s my reflective pause for July 4, 2011.

She considers mindfulness one of the key traits of 21^st century leaders – the capability to see changes in the world around us that the human mind attempts to hold constant or stable. Langer came to this concept when she began to practice deep observation and noticed variations in color and perspective as she attempted to capture images as a painter. For her, an “aha” emerged from her study of tree. For me, it came through the study of snake.

Mindfulness represents a survival trait of humans that’s been around since we first figured out that a snake could be a deadly creature.  Whether our fear of snakes is culturally or genetically induced continues to remain controversial, but most people I know possess an immediate, adverse reaction to snakes. I, on the other hand, have a perspective on snakes shaped by observations of herptiles in nature and in captivity. In fact, at one point in my life I thought I might end up chasing snakes in the Everglades as a career.

Immature Black Racer

I am mindful of snakes in my world. It’s not unusual for me to walk into a space and feel a snake’s presence before I have an opportunity to see it. Reflecting upon mindfulness, I think it’s because I notice snakes as objects out of place in the present. It’s the slight off-shape of a copperhead lying in a burnished pile of fall leaves caught in the cranny of a warm rock or the sense of corn snake in the chicken coop before I reach in to grab an egg sunken in golden straw. On a walk along a graveled road, I’ll notice the shape of a green snake twined among newly minted spring vines. Over a lifetime of ventures in the natural world, I’ve developed an instinct to notice snakes in environments I enter. They are a form of “new thing” that others typically don’t notice – until underfoot.

Interestingly, my younger brother learned early on to notice Indian artifacts when walking fields on our family farm with my father.

Woodland Period Artifacts

In a different way he also notices new things when he’s looking down, even today. He’ll notice things below our typical forward-facing point of view that no one else ever sees- the fossilized shark’s tooth on the beach or a sidewalk nickel.  It strikes me that we’ve both learned a skill that artists possess intuitively, the capability to “not ignore the environment.”

I’ve been working this past year to expand my potential to notice new things in natural and built environments through which I wander. I rely upon my iPhone to capture images everywhere. Some come from nature; others from inside learning spaces. It strikes me that my mind’s eye gets better incrementally at noticing new things in the present from the roadside yarrow to children sprawled all over the floor reading in a library rather than seated at tables and chairs.

It’s hard for me, I admit, to sustain mindful behavior throughout the day. Distracted by thoughts of what’s next on my to do list or the never ending email stream, how many times do I enter learning spaces without being present to notice new things?  Why should I? What difference does it make when life and environment changes around me and I don’t notice?  According to Ellen Langer, when we live in the present, we develop sensitivity to context and become aware of the uncertainties and changes occurring around us. As a result we’re able to maximize our options and avoid danger.  There’s a lesson in Langer’s mindfulness relevant to both avoiding poisonous snakes and leading school communities.

When leaders support others to become mindful, the likelihood increases for not just survival but also advancement of the organization. I’ve learned from my own experiences when I’m with other educators and we’re paying mindful attention in the present, we tend to process our schools as multi-dimensional, active ecosystems in a state of change and accompanying uncertainty.   We no longer see a flat, static environment that only exists in the stability of our mindsets. Instead of talking mostly about visible numbers, we notice people’s interactions, uses of tools, and the evolving habitat.

As a result, we move out of our silos, span boundaries, and collaboratively think together making use of our different perspectives. We begin to understand and process the conundrum of multiple points of view in an ever-changing landscape.  As leaders, when we, and those with whom we work, begin to pay attention in the present, we realize that none of us individually ever has the predictive capability to make certain the future. We find when our community practices mindfulness together, we’re more likely to make informed and intelligent choices for the near future.

Collective mindfulness, an ancient trait of tribal humans, helped our ancestors survive to move civilization from caves to high rises. Mindfulness helped them notice the snake in the grass and the eggs in the nest. Finding our way back to practicing this earliest of community traits may be just what we need to help us negotiate our way successfully through the 21^st century.