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Interesting conversation this morning growing out of, among other things, "The Design of Learning Environments," Chapter 6 of How People Learn, together with some college student comparisons of experiences in their own courses with observations of elementary school classes at a local K-6 Quaker school.  The upshot was, for me at least, a clearer understanding of what one needs to do to create not only more effective learning environments in classrooms but more humane exchange environments generally.

A month ago I spent  several hours watching an opening session in the development of the dance piece "Dance is Hard to See," and talking with choreographer Kathryn Tebordo and the dancers about what I had seen and what dance was, or might be, all about.  "Dance is the purest form of knowledge" emerged from that conversation, which was a rich experience for me, one I have been mulling ever since.  I'm very much looking forward to this coming Sunday's performance of "Dance is Hard to See," to seeing how it has evolved and talking more with Kathryn, the performers, and other audience members about, among other things, what it says about what dance is (see

Learning from "From the Inside":
A Neurodiverse World

Paul Grobstein
August 2009

I've been thinking a lot this summer not only about my own story of myself but also about some general ways of thinking about ... selves, interpersonal relations, inquiry, humanity, and our relation to the universe.  Central to all is has been the notion of "looping," a recurrent and infinitely extended process in which existing structures and forms interact with each other and with an underlying persistent randomness to generate new structures and forms.