Dear Reader,

I’m oftentimes struck by how our monthly through lines in the Studio seem to find such resonance in the rest of my life. I hear the same from Studio members, too. They’ll ask, “How did you know that __ was exactly what I wanted to be thinking about right now? How could you guess that it would sit so much at the heart of what I’d be facing?”

Case in point: Smack in the middle of our study of perception, I got called into jury duty. What a challenging place to be making sense of our senses, right?

Having taken off my shoes and passing through scans that made me feel like I was walking into an airport, I gathered with hundreds of my neighbors into a vast room filling half of the floor of a new building. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered aerial views of the river, the distant mountains, and the city between them.

The orientation began with a video I didn’t remember from past times fulfilling this constitutional duty: County judges discussing the influence of implicit bias on our decisions. While far from a corrective to the ways in which white supremacist policy has been enacted through the courts and penal system, it made me wonder: How might this find its way into the process?

Eventually, I was called into a potential jury. The voir dire questioning came to a point that I remembered from past experiences; an exchange that I imagine many of you have experienced as well. “Juror Number 19, you worked as a teacher. When conflict happened between children, how did you determine what actually happened?”

I explained that, in my experience, that was rarely the goal. Instead, the intention was to create dialog that kept people in relationship with each other, able to express their perspectives and requests of each other, trying to find a path that restored community.

The lawyer rolled her eyes.

Other jurors were asked how they can tell who is telling the truth in the absence of explicit evidence. Many answered that they just know - that body language, vocal intonation, and the eyes conveyed whether or not someone was being honest.

When the lawyer asked if they thought they might be influenced by implicit bias, no one said yes.

Whatever third door might have been opened was locked shut.

I thought about that exchange during a recent Studio Meet-Up. An Australian teacher told a story about a young child who told her about his memories from his time in his mother’s womb. The child was adamant that she not say this was his imagination - so much so that it made me wonder if the word “imagination” had been weaponized against him in the past. Many on the call talked about how important they thought it was to believe the child.

I think that the lawyer would have have approached the idea of “believing the child” as one of ascertaining the precise moment when the child conjured the image he was describing. Was it in utero or more recently?

What the child was asking seemed an entirely different question: Is what I'm feeling valid? Will I be disregarded by my teacher and others?

And the teacher seemed to be asking, How can I align myself with this child’s quest for understanding?

In Deviate, the book we're reading in The Studio this month, Beau Lotto tells us that the path from A to B does not begin with approaching B - it begins with getting to Not A. Recognizing simultaneously that we have a deep seated evolutionary aversion to uncertainty and that we are adapted to adapt - to continually redefine normality - is the beginning of our step out of old thinking that poorly fits new conditions. That step will not be universally embraced: Consider the movement in England toward “super strict schools” that double down on certainty, compliance, and desensitized experience described in this article.

But a “Not A” is possible in our schools. Lotto’s work joins the experiences of so many of us in imagining that moving from A can lead to greater beauty, love, and justice. Amongst other pursuits, attention to perception, reflection, journaling, the arts, dialog, and taking imagination seriously lead us to become more comfortable in the darkness, more aware of our assumptions, of what we are paying attention to and what else we might focus on.

I’m thankful for the opportunity to work together toward increasing awareness of what we are paying attention to, what we’re not paying attention to, and what else is possible.

This month, we continue our focus on perception with a slight shift: thinking about how we develop greater comfort with uncertainty. We'll launch our study in conversation with Anthony Semann and will support our thinking throughouth the month by exploring the language of light and shadow.

WATCHING, LISTENING, READING

​On Solidarity: Anthony Semann in conversation with Peter Moss (video)​

​Expand Your Perception with Dr. Beau Lotto (podcast)​

​Escaping The Matrix (podcast)​

​Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction (essay)​

​Invisible Landscapes (article)​

One more thing:

“Once there are alternatives, the story of quality and high returns is neither natural nor self-evident. Indeed, it can seem to be both unappealing and dangerous, offering an narrow and impoverished view of education and life, and leading to an early childhood education steeped in regulation and control.”

— Peter Moss

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