You have the right
1. To learn about yourself
2. To learn as slow and as fast as you choose (choose/need/want)
3. To rearrange your room (house, garage, life) to make room for your learning
4. To claim space, time, and money for your own learning
5. To learn from people who fascinate you
6. To learn beyond school (at school, outside of school, from school, in spite of school)
7. To ask for and to receive help
8. To learn in quiet with serious intent and without interruption
9. To learn in noise and mess with playful possibility
10. To make a mess and not have to clean up right away
11. To learn what is valuable and to value your own learning
12. To choose your own team of support: teachers, coaches, mentors, advisors
13. To work with people who find you and your visions fascinating
14. To work with people who are fascinated by your brilliant visions and will hold you accountable to live and learn into your greatness
15. To be witnessed
16. To focus
17. To make a difference
18. To make media (make movies, write books, create video games, make art…)
19. To invent new media
20. To study with those you admire
21. To experiment
22. To test limits
23. To contribute to the learning of others
24. To change the world
25. To create your own curriculum and to stick with it
26. To change your mind when it doesn’t work and start again
27. To study in community both near and distant, familiar and exotic
28. To savor the erotic nature of learning
29. To learn from mistakes (to make mistakes in the first place)
30. To join the community of practice of your choice
31. To join the professional network of your choice as a contributor
32. To make learning a priority
33. To pay your dues (do what it takes)
34. To incubate and hibernate
35. To be in action and produce measurable/ concrete results
36. To learn how to discern between the time for #34 and #35
37. To work with people who have some distance and perspective and can help you with #36
38. To dabble (experiment, explore, dream, try it on, try it out)
39. To dive in deep
40. To cross disciplines, modalities, genres, to cross-pollinate
41. To learn what no one can teach
42. To learn so that you might teach others to learn
43. To learn new ways of learning that work for you
44. To practice—to put into practice
45. To pass the torch
46. To be nourished (physically, spiritually, intellectually, socially…)
47. To nourish others
48. To honor yourself as a whole person (you are greater than your goals or anything you do)
49. To honor the yourself as a part of something larger than the parts of your communities (we are greater than the sum of our parts)
50. To set priorities
51. To take care of your needs as a learner
52. To receive feedback both critical and supportive

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

— Henry Miller, notebook, 1932-1933 (quoted in The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall)

Mine, 2012

Note of explanation. The tally marks indicate baby steps toward some goal. My motto: “little and often.”  I draw inspiration from the personal productivity advice from Michael Nobbs: “working on small creative acts on a regular basis can build over time into a substantial body of work.”

The book is so charming, the illustrations and intent so sweet.  And now it’s become one of my most treasured possessions. Look closely and you can see the human touches: the pencil marks, the erasures, the gestures, the staples. The illustrations clearly caricature the artists, just as they tell the story of a time and place very different from today.  The homemade book lives and breathes, long after the people who made it are long gone.

The homemade book is beautiful and charming, and touches us for years. The real charm of the homemade book, however, is what the act of bookmaking does for the bookmaker.

DIY bookmaking requires us to slow down, think, notice, compose, contextualize, design, illustrate and organize.  We have to care deeply for how the whole thing is packaged or it might easily fall apart. If there’s a fundamental difference between reading a book and skimming web pages, imagine the difference between reading and creating a book.  Students in Waldorf schools learn to make their own books, why not adult learners?

In other words, I’m unique like everyone else.

I may be as special as they next guy, but I’m also skeptical. Part of me resists being tested, typecast, and categorized. I’m much more complexly unique than any test can indicate, right? Isn’t all this people-type sorting just a bunch of hooey?

Still another part of me loves typecasting and categorizing as it helps me to get along with other unique people. I can blame your bone-headedness on your unique “learning style,”  or “personality type” and then give you a free pass. More importantly, I’m better able to  empathize with you if I understand that you might experience the world differently than me. And if I’m in the business of collaborating with a team, understanding how my teammates understand might help us all.

What follows is a tour of my doodle notes, featuring a few notable “learning styles” and “personality-type” people sorters, (complete with my snarky editorial comments).

Kolb’s Learning Styles

 Honey and Mumford Learning Styles

Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

V.A.R.K.

A.Q. Autism Spectrum Quotient

Myers Briggs
and the

Enneagram

and then there’s this. After all the intense doodling I did for this page, I just had to make up a people sorter of my own. So here it is:

The SBPI

or the Steve or Bill Personality In-dick-ator. (This one has less to do with how unique I am, and more to do with how I might classify the significant others in my life.)

Embodied Arts Series Coming to Toronto this October

Come join us for an exploration and inquiry through movement.

• Workshop, Saturday, October 8, 10 am -5 pm: “Your Life, Your Story, Your Dance” With Gennie Brukner, Henry Wai, and Vivek Patel. A Day of art making, dance making and life focusing through Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation Dance, martial arts (Ninjitsu) and visual arts. We’ll ask the big questions: Who am I being in this body, in my relationships, in the world? What’s holding me back? For what am I willing to give my life? How might I move through my life with  presence, attention, and intention? $75-100 for the day the Lower Ossington Theatre, Light vegetarian lunch included.

• Workshop, Saturday, October 15, 10 am – 4 pm: “Your Creation Story” a day of butoh, dance making, storytelling, creative writing, and visual art  At “What Next” 7-12 Fraser Ave.  $75-100 for the day. With Patricia Kambitsch and Maureen “MomoButoh” Freehill.  Light vegetarian lunch included. Members of the workshop will be invited to rehearsal and performance on October 16. (Making this a two day workshop, and quite a deal!)
• Performance, Sunday, October 16, 7 pm: “Creation Stories” an intimate performance and gallery show including members of the October 8 class at “What Next” 7-12 Fraser Ave. ($15, or free for attendees of Saturday’s workshop)

For more information contact Patricia Kambitsch at 416.799.6750 

or email  patricia @ playthink  .  com

THE PRACTICES

BUTOH was founded by dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno in the 1960’s. This originally Japanese avant-garde performance art utilized principles from traditional Japanese theater and contemporary dance, poetic imagery, meditation and theatrical improvisation to create a unique art form that now influences artists of all genres worldwide.Momo’s work includes a collection of dance performance films created in honor of her teacher, butoh pioneer, Kazuo Ohno. The films, honoring butoh’s 50 year anniversary explores daily dance as spiritual practice, life and death issues, and playfully experimental public performance.

CONTACT IMPROVISATION dance supports us in being present, fully embodied and physically intelligent through movement exploration and deep listening in contact with another person. Contact Improvisation is a free play between two or more moving bodies. Practices includes following a physical point of contact and supporting and giving weight to a partner. Sometimes quiet and meditative, sometimes wild and athletic, it is a dance open to all bodies and enquiring minds.

AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT is a practice of embodied presence that will help you become deeply connected with yourself through the use of movement and sound in the presence of a witness. You will be invited to close your eyes and open up to your inner landscape of experience; then to move and sound spontaneously (which can include stillness and silence) out of this relatedness to yourself. Authentic movement can be great fun, deeply moving, and powerfully restorative.  It can help you to shake off the bindings of inhibitions and self-consciousness, whether inherited or self-imposed, and free you up to commune with your essential self.

THE ARTISTS

MAUREEN FREEHILL is known for innovative ways of fusing eastern and western practices of somatics and spirituality and viewing performance as a vehicle for personal, cultural and global awakening. She has been a performer and somatic/dramatic art instructor for over 25 years and holds an MFA in Directing/Asian Performance from University of Hawaii, Yoga Teacher Certification and Dance Therapy training at Naropa Institute. She lived, studied and performed for 5 years in Japan with butoh masters Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno. She has also led workshops and performed internationally including events with Katsura Kan, Akira Kasai, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, musician Kitaro and Noh master Kanze Hideo. Currently she dwells in the Pacific Northwest where she teaches and performs regularly.

HENRY WAI started dancing at the tender age of 44 and has been exploring a world of movement possibility and fun ever since.  He has learned with a variety of Contact Improvisation teachers including Nancy Stark Smith, one of the pioneers of Contact dance.  Henry delights in introducing Contact Improvisation to newcomers and has a particular enthusiasm for teaching people with little or no dance background.

GENNIE BRUKNER  trained for three years at the Authentic Movement Institute in Berkeley, California.  She also trained with Ruth Zaporah in Action Theatre, Emilie Conrad Doud in Continuum Movement, Charlotte Selver in Sensory Awareness and Nina Martin in Ensemble Improvisation.  Her work is always informed by her meditation practice.

PATRICIA KAMBITSCH has been leading interdisciplinary arts workshops and groups for over fifteen years. A visual artist and author, she explores the interplay of painting and writing with other forms including performance art and dance. She is a member of MomoButoh Dance company.

Elsa and me working at Design with Dialogue at OCAD

I’m doing my homework: I’m scouring the internet. I’m reading and learning from the work of others. Each and every day I challenge myself to draw something new, whether it’s drawing a cartoon panel, translating notes from a Ted talk, or copying images from RSA Animate, or creating caricatures of my loved ones. I’m keeping a notebook journal of icons and visual symbols, I’m buying Sharpie Flip Chart markers in bulk, and I’m posting my work on my Playthink website.

The payoff for all this work has been big. Over the past month I’ve had the honor of working with urban agriculture activists, neighborhood activists, climate change scientists, city government planners, academics, and designers. Within one week I found myself sketching at Toronto’s Design with Dialogue session on “Enabling Arab-Jewish Dialogue”  and scribing at a healing weekend in Dayton for the Ohio Aids Coalition. Visual recording and reflection is quite powerful for people who have grown weary of Powerpoint and word-dense, talking-head meetings.

I’m learning that doodles have the power not just to record, but to transform conversation. Connections are easy to make between abstract content and concrete action. Slippery statements are captured and quiet voices are amplified. Participants with short little attention spans (who doesn’t have those?) tell me that watching the pictures helps them to focus and concentrate.

Learning how to sketch words into pictures has been a lifelong process. Doodling was a means of survival for me in school. When I scribbled in my notebooks, lectures seemed to sink in better than if I tried to take notes. As an adult, doodling helped me to survive countless meetings that might have otherwise crushed my spirit to pieces.

As a reading specialist in public high school, I found that nearly all of my struggling students were visual or kinesthetic learners. I shared my doodles and  Tony Buzan’s mindmapping techniques with students who couldn’t otherwise sit still.  And now, it seems, visual methods enhance learning for nearly everyone. I’m receiving some of my most enthusiastic feedback from even the most  geeky, linear, sequential, verbal types.

Visual engagement is powerful. I hope to learn much more. The next step in my Slow Learning process is to connect with other graphic and visual practitioners. This is the scary part for me. I’ll need to swallow my pride a bit and show them what I’ve done. I’ll need to swallow my pride even more and ask them what I need to do.

Finding important work for me has been a lifelong struggle that, at times, fills me with pain and self-doubt.

I’m comforted by  the words of David Whyte, who calls this search a pilgrimage.

The stakes in good work are necessarily high. Our competence may be at stake in ordinary, unthinking work, but in good work that is a heartfelt expression of ourselves, we know, in the end, we are our gift to others and the world. Failure in truly creative work is not some mechanical breakdown but the prospect of a failure in our very essence, a kind of living death. Little wonder we often choose the less vulnerable, more familiar approach that places work mostly in terms of provision. If I can reduce my image of work to just a job I have to do, then I keep myself safely away from the losses to be endured in putting my heart’s desire at stake. (Crossing the Unknown Sea, p. 13)