Ancestors
The subject's vital statistics...and his doings and accomplishments are already a matter of public record. ...But what is his story? What, in other words, is his functional mythology, his personal frame of reference? ("The Blue Devils of Nada," Albert Murray)
These essays do not constitute a traditional literature review. They are homages and recognitions. In a way I have always felt myself to be within a history, along a road in dialogue with those who preceded, and even perhaps, with those to come. My method in composing these essays was in proceeding respectfully to the familiar places and sources. I allowed myself the time and leisure to attend to, to take note, and to sit down. This was not about hero worship but a sense of obligation that sometimes anoints us to know and name our elders.
I have blended and reinvented events and scenarios that might never have taken place except in the alchemized moment of when we draw connections between theory and practice; our lives and the work of others. The words of the actual writers are italicized. Sometimes they insisted on becoming my own. I have cut and pasted my way through the details of their lives and work, their writings on Teaching and Learning; Community; Curriculum; The Arts and Democratic Schools, to assemble a pedagogy. The accuracy of the scholarship lies in fidelity to the soul of their work.
How do you start to enter a tradition, claim it as your own, unless you spend time in its galleries, linger in front of its canvases and repeat their words aloud, until it fills you like music?
Essays: "Looking for Ancestors" "The Lives of Children" [George Dennison] "The Exercise of Initiative in a Mixed City" [Paul Goodman] "They Must Above All Live In The World" [Lucy Sprague Mitchell] "My Great Grandfather's Cart and the Scholarship that Lies Close to Practice"
Socially Engaged Scholarship
see also Biographies