WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.720 It is Tuesday, July 19th, 2016, right? 00:00:13.020 --> 00:00:13.520 Yep. 00:00:13.560 --> 00:00:17.800 And this is Room in the Trees. A podcast about... 00:00:18.340 --> 00:00:19.320 What is it about? 00:00:21.100 --> 00:00:22.700 Okay, let me get it. 00:00:24.280 --> 00:00:25.580 That was easy. 00:00:28.120 --> 00:01:02.760 The following was recorded on June 28th, 2016. This is episode number 13, Social Creature. Room in the Trees is hosted by Trent Reynolds and me, Sabrina Harrison show notes including pictures, links, video and more for every episode can be found at roominthetrees.com I was very pleased to see Yumi show up as our newest Patreon subscriber, Yumi is an artist who works here at my studio space, so shout out to Yumi, very grateful to her for supporting the podcast 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:07.540 I'm having fun making these little audio bibs Bob's for the Patreon folks. 00:01:07.960 --> 00:01:13.080 Thanks everyone for your support. However you share it, 00:01:13.800 --> 00:01:14.560 pass it on, 00:01:15.100 --> 00:02:05.100 enjoy it and leave a review. If you feel inspired by it. So the update is I've got a bike. I got a great use Schwinn bike off Craigslist for $25. dollars. I almost cried riding it today. I was so happy. I thought, "I'm seeing the city!" So I was biking. I went to an eye doctor's appointment. I looked up on YouTube how to actually load my bike onto the front of a bus before I went and attempted it because I was like, "I'm gonna be such a tool trying to put my bike on a bus while people are waiting. And so I totally showed off to the bus driver. I'm like, I looked it up online to learn and see a demonstration about how to do this. And he's like, you're an ideal passenger. Lots of people try to put their bike on and they get so discouraged they just bike away. Anyway, so I learned how to do that. We don't have to put that on. 00:02:25.900 --> 00:03:12.180 a really big stickler for color matching. I hate when stuff is printed too high key and too bright, or else totally too flat. So very excited about that. And people can-- they're easy to order, and they can choose from-- any of the pages or spreads from any of the books and they can just take a picture with their phone email it to me um and well maybe i'll put a link or something in the show notes um but it's just it's i'm excited about it and my stuff is here that we'll go into further detail about that in uh But some stuff arrived. 600 pounds of stuff has arrived. 00:03:14.220 --> 00:03:14.900 Yeah. 00:03:15.960 --> 00:03:16.620 Awesome. 00:03:17.540 --> 00:03:30.860 And I'm just excited about people listening to the podcast. We're getting, you know, a couple thousand people listening every month, which is... it's kind of wonderful and wild to think about. 00:03:31.400 --> 00:03:39.820 Yeah, it's hard to really imagine that quantity of people listening. You know, it's kind of amazing. 00:03:41.300 --> 00:03:52.800 So I remember about a year and a half ago you discovering Dan and his space and the kind of school he created. And how did that all happen? You were so inspired by it. 00:03:52.800 --> 00:06:48.080 Yeah, I really was. I had just an amazing experience visiting Daniel's Learning Center. And maybe before I tell that story, I want to give the disclaimer that we really don't go into enough detail about what is going on at the Learning Center. We don't go into much detail about Daniel's educational history and his qualifications and the research that he's been involved in and all the programs that he's developed for for these kids so you really should go and well look at the show notes will include some videos and and some information there but his website is Franklin ed dot com and you should definitely go read up on on what he's doing at his learning center. So a couple years ago, a mutual friend introduced me to Daniel because he thought I would be interested in what he was doing at the learning center. And so I visited one afternoon, and I remember walking in just... kind of being amazed not necessarily by what was on the wall or the decor or the even the teachers there it was this feeling that I had when I walked into the space of just being comfortable feeling welcome not feeling like I was out of place or the new person around or There was just this immediate sense of comfort and ease. And I came to realize that this was a product of Daniel, of what he was, him as a person, and what he was able to build there. So I was very impressed by what I saw at the Learning Center. thought a great deal about it afterward, but did not see Daniel after that day until a couple weeks ago. He showed up at my front door, the front door of my new studio space, and he came to join a Friday evening drawing session. that he had found through a flyer that I had sent to a group that he was already a member of. So we made eye contact. He recognized me. I recognized him. And it was kind of this amazing moment because I had no clue that he had this background in art. and learned after talking to him for a little while that evening that he had been away from it for 13 years, and only recently had returned to his drawing group. So that night, it was obvious to me that he would be excellent to have on the podcast, and I'm so glad that he was willing to spend time talking to us. And with that, Let's go ahead and listen to our conversation with Daniel Franklin. 00:06:49.260 --> 00:07:44.580 Where was your first contact with making art? It was really the beginning of all my learning. I was drawing and painting and creating things. way before I was doing any meaningful reading or writing or math or any other formal academic thing. Formal academic skills came very slowly to me and with enormous effort. I had an extraordinary art teacher, Mrs. Eleanor Veldahl, and I spent as much of my four years in high school as I could in her art room. because that's where I found fulfillment and I found success. And I was always most at ease in the art room. 00:07:46.740 --> 00:07:50.700 - That just resonates so much with me. I think for you, Trent, too. 00:07:52.160 --> 00:08:22.660 I think not only was it a place that felt like, I don't know, where I found success and I felt validation and felt able to express and... but it felt like a safe social environment. Like, I'm just thinking of that class that Sabrina and I were a part of. It was a really tight-knit group, and I think in part because of the atmosphere that our teacher created. You know, it was a place that we could have real conversation. 00:08:23.780 --> 00:08:53.400 One thing that comes to mind as you say that, Trenton, is how it was a place that our group, we were all doing our own thing. So it wasn't that formal... I don't know if that was similar for you, Daniel, but that feeling that you weren't following one assignment when you were in high school. I was learning, teaching myself photography and trying to do a painting and there was some people doing ceramics, but there was an openness to exploration, which I think led to a lot of liberation of what we were interested in. 00:08:53.400 --> 00:09:41.400 There's a very interesting connection I just realized between what you experienced, both Trent and Sabrina and I, which is a charismatic teacher, which is crucial. My art room was what it was because of the teacher. And that was the main draw. And had it not, had there been a teacher with whom I didn't feel a bond or a connection, or didn't feel had a genuine interest in me or concern for me and a curiosity about me, and Mrs. Melvall did. She was all of those things to all students. And I suspect you had a similar experience with your art room teacher. 00:09:41.400 --> 00:09:43.400 Right, yes, definitely. 00:09:43.400 --> 00:11:25.620 And in a way, it was that experience with that teacher. And one or two others who were extremely formative to me began to shape what became-- I didn't realize it at the time, of course--what became my career in education. a belief in myself as a learner, an understanding of what a really great teacher is, an understanding of how learning can be fun. These were things I learned in the art room from my art teacher and by doing art. A teacher's greatest resource is their enormous capacity for creativity. Teachers are at their best when they are being creative in their craft as a teacher, no matter what they're teaching. The more I thought about the role of creativity in generating good teaching practices and translating into significant learning outcomes for students, I began to think about people in general and about humans and humanity. And humans, if they're anything, they're enormously creative. The things that humanity does, the marvelous things that we do in terms of science and medicine and the arts and science. are creative acts. Going to the moon, the Apollo missions to the moon, were extraordinary acts of creativity. 00:11:26.380 --> 00:12:20.620 A couple weeks ago, we had a conversation with Sabrina's dad, who's a movie director, and he was giving me some advice on some workshops and setting up a community here, as you've seen what I'm trying to set up here. And he said that, he said, people want to come to your workshop to be turned on. They don't want to come to be fed information or, you know, instructions. They want to be inspired. And I think that ties into what you're saying is that we want to sense the potential, our creative potential. And that's what really invigorates us and makes us productive is when we see that we have this capacity to create. And that could be creating or solving problems about water purity or government, or it could be just seeing the potential of making marks on a piece of paper. 00:12:21.340 --> 00:14:44.700 Yes. And you touch on another really interesting and wonderful facet of the topic of creativity that... Whenever a capacity is selected out for in the course of evolution, so for example, the capacity to love your offspring or your companion, that's an inborn innate capacity that's selected for because it's It's good for your species. It helps your species survive. And if we have an innate capacity, such as caring for another, we feel good when we care for another. Or if we have a capacity to... do something like play, which we do. There's an instinct. All mammals engage, young mammals engage in play. There's an instinct for it. And doing it feels good. There's a reason we have that instinct. Being creative, too, is... There are instinctive characteristics of all people to derive satisfaction from being creative. And so when we... When we have this inborn, this innate capacity, something in us, we need to exercise it because it's part of who we are. And when we don't, we are stifling something. And a lot of the disenchantment with life, I believe, comes from the fact that, sometimes individuals don't have the opportunity to exercise something that's innate and deep within them and needs expression and it's why providing art and art classes and opportunities for the arts is so essential and the role of the art teacher in society is so critical and yet frequently overlooked our art department budgets are among the first to be cut in school budget, getting art education out there and in the world and to children who respond to creativity with such a vigor and enthusiasm and excitement. 00:14:44.700 --> 00:15:13.200 - People wanna feel liberated, I think, in their experience of art. They don't really know that, but there's a sense of liberation that happens in the physicality of making. I really believe in the physicality of your whole being, your whole body being engaged in the making, using your hands. And I especially think that's something that's very much lost as you get older. 00:15:13.200 --> 00:16:17.160 I was going to say, what you just said, the physicality, it reminds me of this video that I watched on your website, Daniel, about connection and conversation where you were, I think the example you were giving is what a conversation with a new student might look like, and you had them... talk about a falling star and how the falling star came in through the atmosphere and heated up and you had them rubbing their hands together to feel friction and I don't know, it was like you engaging them not just intellectually but actually emotionally in using their hands to actually, to feel that heat that comes from friction and I don't know, there's a physicality and a sense of relationship between you and the person and the person and the world that surrounds them that I can see how that would be so much more engaging and I don't know, provide an opening for you to really connect with this person. 00:16:17.260 --> 00:17:06.160 There's been some exchange and some discussion and some learning, because no matter what the student's knowledge level is of meteors or meteorites, something I know a fair amount about, so I can always elevate the level of the discussion to a level that's There's some novel information generally coming into the conversation. Learning feels good. We have innate capacity to learn. So when we learn, we actually feel good. Learning, you get that satisfaction, that deep satisfaction when you learn. So suddenly a child is learning, or a teen or young adult is learning something new, and they're beginning to feel good. It also allows them to feel like we have some connection now. We have a little history. And in the context of that, that history and that connection is when you can then begin to have a really good conversation. 00:17:06.820 --> 00:17:30.580 So I think in Sabrina's workshops, that makes me think, Sabrina, how oftentimes you'll start by by with prompts, with questions that are very specific. So they cannot be responded to with general kind of cliched answers. You know, what's your what's your. favorite memory of a kitchen floor? Was that one of them? 00:17:31.500 --> 00:17:50.840 Yeah, keeping it at a rhythm that keeps it, kind of throws them off their game. A lot of people come in with, even with children, it's always a little bit more amazing, but coming in with five roads you've walked down, 00:17:52.320 --> 00:17:52.820 four, 00:17:52.400 --> 00:18:20.240 You know, your father's shoes by front doors. And just the free writing process of that and the sharing of that. Just the subtle ways you can sort of open and get people back down into their self. And come from that place into the work and into their life. it sort of takes them home in a way that I find very effective. 00:18:21.240 --> 00:18:52.900 One of the quotes that I was interested to talk about comes from one of the informational pages on your site that says, learning is most effective when it is approached through social interaction. And we've just been talking about that a little bit, but I wonder, though, if that focus on social interaction is unusual in the academic world. I don't see it. It sounds unusual, that being a focus. Is that unusual or is that commonplace, you think? 00:18:53.320 --> 00:20:35.600 I think a lot of what happened in... some educational situations is that we move away from an approach that leverages our most useful resource in learning, which is the human brain is a social organ. There's a wonderful new book called The Social Neural Science of Education by Louis Cosolino at Pepperdine University, who explores this issue in a very beautiful way and talks about these mechanisms within humans, all humans, and one mechanism in particular, the mechanism for attachment, wanting to be connected to somebody. It's an innate mechanism that starts from infancy. And those same mechanisms, the innate mechanisms of attachment, become the mechanisms by which we learn. And so we want always to be thinking about how we leverage what we already have to promote learning and one of the most critical components is this mechanism of attachment. So getting students feeling safe and secure with their teacher is critical. And learning in the context of a social dynamic almost always is one of the most effective ways to learn, especially for children, teens, young adults approaching education. as a form of social interaction. 00:20:35.600 --> 00:21:37.000 Well, it seems to me like that might very well be what made me feel so at home when I visited your school. And what felt so much to me like an art classroom was that comfort that I felt, the social comfort, you know, or the social safety. When I met people, they were smiling at me, they were asking me questions. When you walked around and talked to teachers and introduced me to teachers, It was obvious that you were invested in these people and knew them and you were asking them specific questions about what they were talking about. It was like that social fluidity or comfort, it didn't really matter what they were, the subject matter that they were talking about. There is that, I don't know, that room created, the psychological and emotional space to expand. It's really interesting to me to hear you talk this way because that very much feels what I love about art classes and hasn't been my experience as much in academic classes. 00:21:37.700 --> 00:22:13.600 Do you think it's something to do with the decisiveness, Daniel's decisiveness about what he was creating in his vision for it and not being hesitant, like just a confidence in without, you know, kind of taking charge of establishing that tone? Daniel, when you started, what was the feeling like when you thought, I'm going to start a school? Do you think I'm crazy? Or because of your background and success of schooling that you felt extremely confident and you just were like, boom, boom, boom, I got this. How was that? from the germination of that? 00:22:13.840 --> 00:24:54.900 Technically, we call it a learning center. We're not formally a school. It's students of all ages, from first grade through high school, seniors in high school. And I never had a plan. You know, that old saying that when you look back on what you've done, it seems as if there was a marvelous plan. There wasn't. I was a graduate student at UCLA. I was very experienced in working with children, teens and young adults with slowly emerging academics, skills, especially reading and writing. I was very successful in supporting them, not only in terms of helping them become more skilled with written language, but organizational skills and time management skills and study skills and self-advocacy skills. and I was doing this by myself individually. As I got busier, I had an opportunity to add one person and then a second person. As I say, we grew here one relationship at a time. And we always put the quality of the relationship above all other considerations. Because in the context of healthy relationships, people do great things. And they do them voluntarily. And the warm vibe you get being in my learning center is because everyone knows they have permission to be who they are. There are no expectations. You notice we don't have any rules posted. We don't use any rewards or punishments. And remember, in the eyes of a child, a withheld reward is a punishment. And so we never, we don't use rewards or punishments. In fact, if you look at people who have very healthy relationships, they don't have a reward and punishment system. They say, if we're good to one another for two days, we'll go to dinner. You go to dinner. You think that you're not good to each other, you are, you have a fight, you don't, or you have two wonderful days and you go to dinner. You do things together because that's how you foster positive relationships. You don't foster them with rewards or punishments. You don't foster them by violence. by being rigid and inflexible. The things that we do naturally to foster positive relationships turns out to be the same things that your art teacher did and my art teacher did to create a wonderful learning environment. 00:24:55.200 --> 00:25:17.000 Which is a tremendous investment, not just in time and effort, but in vulnerability and allowing yourself to love. I think what it comes down to is to truly invest completely in the people, in what you stand for. And it's hard to do. It is hard to do. 00:25:17.000 --> 00:26:37.600 I Always keep in mind a Maya Angelou quote, the great American poet Maya Angelou quote. And as she said, I don't remember what people said to me. I don't remember what people did to me. But I always remember how people made me feel. And as teachers, if we can just stay focused on that, that I want always for the students in my classroom to remember me as someone who was kind to them. them. And when we do that, students tend to be responsive, tend to be polite, tend to care about themselves and the people around them, and tend to be the most creative and to learn the most. Because I try to exercise that philosophy as much as possible, I think you see the things that you see in my learning center. What a pleasure it's been to be able to speak, Sabrina, with you and Trent. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Perhaps we can chat more sometime. 00:26:38.400 --> 00:26:43.900 I certainly hope so. And thank you for making so much time for us. It really has been wonderful. 00:26:46.700 --> 00:27:29.780 Everybody, you need to go and visit franklined.com and learn more about what Daniel is creating at his learning center. Many, many thanks to Daniel for giving us some of his time. You can find show notes for this podcast. at roomofthetrees.com you can support us by subscribing at patreon.com backslash room it really helps us reach more people if you will take a moment and rate us and write a review on iTunes my brother Brent provided the music for this podcast he can be found at soundcloud.com by searching for Venters Stag Motel and next week 00:27:29.780 --> 00:27:34.340 we're going to talk about stuff next week literally stuff. 00:27:36.180 --> 00:27:39.060 Literally 600 pounds of stuff. 00:27:40.320 --> 00:27:42.400 Absolutely. You guys are awesome. 00:27:43.320 --> 00:27:46.700 Over and out. Talk to you later, Trent. 00:27:47.740 --> 00:27:49.640 All right. Talk to you later. 00:27:52.500 --> 00:27:56.680 You guys enjoy some summer. 00:28:05.680 --> 00:28:09.120 That was easy.