Negative Space?

"There is so much action in New York one is sometimes perversely excited by those moments, or those places, when one is not part of it. Where nothing is happening. These places, in turn, become little air-pockets of possibility—what I call negative space. They are unidentified, off the grid, the staging areas for trysts, seductions, encounters. They are the places where crimes are committed, of one kind or another." 

Central Park Lovers (1970s) by Dominique Nabokov

...and so Thomas Beller begins a tale of New York's Central Park in the 1970s, his high school "rich kid" friends, and the power of urban geography. Mr. Beller's piece in The New York Review of Books is a teaser for a story collection to be published soon, but for me it was an immediate window back to essential moments of my life.

I wasn't one of these kids - not a rich kid, not a private school kid, not a native of Manhattan, not on familiar terms with any doorman - but, small world that New York can be sometimes, I knew who hung out with these guys, but the city, the spaces, the concepts, are all deeply familiar.

WTC Plaza in 1978: Photo Joe Margolis via Flickr/About

"Long ago, when I was a kid, this whole area west of the Trade Center was just a giant beach. They'd filled all this land in, out beyond the old pier lines, when they built the towers, but then they'd argued about this place called "Battery Park City" for two decades. So it sat there, vast and empty and cool in the summer and icy in the winter and all we had to do was hop the fence and you could do anything out here, soccer, or stickball, drugs or sex, sunbathing or music – it was the most un-Manhattan place in Manhattan, and we loved it.

"We loved all of downtown then. Companies were fleeing New York and Tribeca hadn't happened yet and nobody at all lived anywhere around. The old folks bitched that the Trade Center was ugly and too big and too square and the plaza was horrible and boring and the shopping mall was just a shopping mall. But fuck them. The towers were fucking brilliant, transparent and glowing and changing colors with every twitch of the sky. For the price of fairly but not absurdly expensive drinks you could go hang out and get hammered up top at Windows with the best view on the planet. You could skateboard or rollerblade or dance all night to whatever music you could bring to the plaza and the lightposts had outlets right there for power. And after all the suits left the whole lower level was for play. We'd meet guys on the cleaning crew for soccer games lots of Sunday nights in the lobby of One."

That's a story of mine, called "The Beach," not in The New York Review of Books (but, whatchagonnado?), but talking - again even if not with the words - about "negative space."

Negative Spaces, those spaces between, hold so much power for kids, and even more during adolescence. In one of my favorite books about education, Peter Høeg's Borderliners, the negative spaces are so small, carved in a fleeting bit of time in a stairwell, among the stacks in a library, deep in the night for those students boarded at the school... at one critical moment in that narrative it is only a snowstorm which provides the separation, that the power rises to almost unbearable heights.

Of course. It is only in these spaces between, these spaces off the grid, that kids can pause, look up the stars or down into themselves. It is only in these spaces that they can summon the courage to try the very new and very uncertain, or to let themselves experience their deepest fears. And it is only in these spaces that they can take ultimate risks - yes - including with each other.

So, in our panicked-about-safety-and-lawsuits-and-child-sexuality moment-in-time, is there any way to begin to give students in our schools something like "negative spaces"? In an age where a child unseen for a moment is viewed - immediately - as a threat, can we extend some sense of privacy to the students in our care?

Tommy James and the Shondells - I Think We're Alone Now

This is not about sex. Well, maybe it is. I told a group of principals last year that I thought it was wrong "to design our Middle Schools around the belief that any two students aged 12-14, left out of sight for two minutes, would have sex." "Maybe they will," I added, probably not winning any converts, "but if so, they were gonna do it anyway."

Yes, worst case I suppose, but this is really about allowing students to breathe. "It was a kind of no-man’s-land, a place of possibility," Beller says of Manhattan's green space, and I thought of all the "places of possibility" of my youth, from an abandoned military base to an abandoned railway station, from the catwalk above the stage in my Junior High's auditorium to the odd turret spaces which ended the corners of my high school, from the long corridor linking the high school library to the rest of the building - broken into caves by panels displaying artwork - to the tops of the stair towers overlooking the river in the Kresge Art Center at Michigan State. These were places I could breathe, dream, fantasize, imagine, hope, cry. I thought of how a curve of rock along a winter beach might be the safest place I knew at age 13, or how the space in front of the air-conditioner on the roof of Macy's might have been the most intimate at 15.

Above: Platform of the Wykagyl NYB&WRR Station in New Rochelle, NY (last used in 1929)
Below: Fort Slocum in its ruins (now all demolished) David's Island, New Rochelle, NY

or, Below: if you went to the top of The Mall garage behind Macy's and took
the ladder to the store roof, you had Long Island Sound spread out before you.

Superblue's Moatfield climber/shelter

Superblue, a London design firm mentioned in the previous "play" post, offers some "halfway" ideas. Their Moatfield Community Space creates both play possibilities and a level of possible privacy, as does their Radlett design. "The shelter has two seating spaces, one covered, one open. Running through the structure is a unique hexagon climbing strip which lets people climb up to the roof or can be used as monkey bars from below," the designer's say about Moatfield, which mixes that sense of privacy with security visibility.

Orestad College in Denmark (3XN Architects) manages to create many "spaces between" without creating dark corners. A "Youth Factory" space for teens in Spain, and a Swiss athletic facility might add to your idea possibilities. Look to the parks kids love for more inspiration, and how teens group themselves in coffee shops. An Albuquerque, New Mexico High School has created a hotel-like lobby, with all the choices of levels-of-privacy that suggests.

Denmark's Orestad College (secondary)

Thinking about this requires a very radical shift in school design vocabulary. It requires a shift in how we imagine "time" as well... remember my post - long ago - about the magical impact on a high school of having ten minutes between classes? (negative space requires negative time). It also requires a shift in adult behavior. I've been told, many times, by school librarians that they need to be able to "see the whole room." But by this they mean that they need to see the whole room from one chair behind the circulation desk. If that's the plan, what you need is not a "learning environment" but a "panopticon," which is a prison, not a school.

For "negative spaces" to exist effectively and positively, the adults in the building must be mobile in space and in time, wandering - not on patrol but in search of interaction and opportunities to support. What made the Central Park of the 1970s still "relatively safe" during New York City's social collapse was the amount it was used. You might feel alone, but alone was a relative term.

(When I worked in one high school in the mid-1990s, I wandered the corridors all day as I built the school's highly sophisticated - for the time - network. Access to research CD towers from every classroom, every printer networked, high-end computers for every science class group table, etc. As I wandered those halls - on my random time - I saw lots of what even the "discipline assistant principal" never saw. Maybe I contributed to safety. I know that I found that no prohibited behavior was absent - though I never really saw anyone hurting anyone else.)

So I'm asking you to think about this. To consider how we all need those "negative spaces" during our days. And to consider how we might try to meet our students half way on this.

- Ira Socol

Blackout

The freedom of people

and their right to be informed,

to govern themselves,

to educate themselves,

must matter more than

lifetime guaranteed profits

for the one percent.

For more on the Blackout
Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take On Two Piracy Bills (The New York Times)
Stop Sopa or the web really will go dark (Guardian)
The Media Tycoons (The New York Times)

For more on SOPA and PIPA
The Guardian Explainer
Obama Position (The New York Times)
Google "Take Action    Google's Position
Mozilla
Wikipedia
Sopa Explained (CNN Money)
Why SOPA is dangerous (Mashable)

For more on the unified tactics of the corporate right
For God so loved the 1%... (The New York Times)
The ALEC Agenda for Education (Parents United)
ALEC, the Koch Brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the "Conservative" Agenda (Daily Kos)

https://blacklists.eff.org/

Vote with your votes, and vote with your purchasing power.

See SOPA Supporters List Here

Do not support those who work against you, whether in big box stores, online, or on your main or high street.

(If your local Chamber of Commerce is on this list, tell every member you meet to dis-associate or you will stop doing business with them)

The conversations we need to have about Occupy Davis

There have been two "grass roots" movements spring up in the United States since President Obama was elected. The "Tea Party" and the "Occupy Movement."

University of California at Davis students reoccupy their campus's Quad Monday
the way kids at a geek/ag school do, with high-level engineering

One, though I do not doubt either the passions or energies of many followers, has been revealed to not actually be "grass roots," but "astroturf roots" in our political parlance of the day, that is, the movement was either wholly created, or hijacked at birth, by the Koch Brothers and other extreme right wing corporate types - you know, the kind who argue that a corporation must be treated as a citizen in all ways except liability and tax rates.

"No taxation without
representation," here in a
protest document signed by
John Hancock. Sadly, only
half the quote can be
recalled by Republicans.

The other, the "Occupy" movement, is very clearly a bottom-up mass movement which owes its capabilities to the powerful affordances of those "new technologies" so many in education find unimportant.

Thus, one is a classic movement of the modern era, the Tea Party is a top down, wealth-financed movement which owes its strategies and techniques to the powerful political class - they even have their own cable television network in FoxNews. It is, of course, limited by national boundaries and has very traditional goals.

The other is of the contemporary world. Its television is LiveStream and UStream, its media is Twitter, Text-Messaging, and Blogs. Its strategies are ad hoc and constantly evolving. It has proven itself to be global almost overnight. And one more thing, which traditional politicians, leaders, even many educators fail to understand, it is non-specific about most goals because it is about democracy. It is a global pro-democracy effort, and naturally it terrifies the oligarchs, whether American, British, Russian, whatever.

Both groups have some connection to American roots. The Tea Party - and perhaps this works because of the memory issues of many Social Security and Medicare collecting adherents of the cause - bases its appeal in the first half of the four word slogan of the 1773 Boston Tea Party. It is stunningly amusing that this movement which now paralyzes most American government cannot recall all four words, although, to be fair, two of the four words have multiple syllables, so, ya know... but it is also horrifyingly sad that Americans know so little of even their own history.

The "Occupy Movement" comes, on the other hand, from something very deep in American history, and something universally appealing: true democracy, where the voices of all are heard and the needs of all are respected. There is much about the Occupy Movement, laughed at as it was when born from powerless unknowns two months ago as Occupy Wall Street, which links directly back to Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, equally opposed to power from London, Albany/Kingston (New York's seat of government at the time) or Portsmouth/Exeter (New Hampshire's seat of government at the time), and to those who formed the Free Republic of Franklin in 1784, and maybe to those who made Woodstock the safest large city in the United States in 1969.

"The [Free Republic of Franklin] legislature made treaties with the Indian tribes in the area (with few exceptions, the most notable being the Chickamauga), opened courts, incorporated and annexed five new counties, and fixed taxes and officers' salaries. Barter was the economic system de jure, with anything in common use among the people allowed in payment to settle debts, including federal or foreign money, corn, tobacco, apple brandy, and skins ([The Governor] was often paid in deer hides)."

This is a global, a universal, a human idea. Unlike the Tea Party's commitment to selfishness - "I don't want to pay for anything anyone else may receive." - the Occupy Movement  is based in basic humanity, we all deserve opportunity, we all deserve to be included in society, we all deserve to be heard. And this is a radical re-understanding of democracy, because, though the roots of this run deep in early America, it is not what we've taught in school the past 150 years, where the concept that "majority rule" = "democracy" has taken charge, along with the idea that "democracy" = "you get to vote occasionally."

When Norman Rockwell described "Freedom of Speech"
as one of the Four Freedoms we fought WWII for,
he used the Occupy Movement's "General Assembly"
as the model.

The "General Assemblies" which drive the Occupy Movement are nothing more than the "Town Meeting" which Americans once saw as democracy at its best, people gathered together to listen to each other and to respectfully make decisions. It is a different notion of democracy than in which Americans get to vote among highly limited choices. And it is a cross between the democracy early Americans understood and the European vision of democracy in which the tyranny of the majority is to be prevented at all costs, and in which the human rights to education, health care, and shelter are every bit as important as any right to vote.

The Occupy Movement is not a counterpart to the Tea Party notion of selfishness and our society doing less for each other, rather, it is call for a fundamental rethinking of what democracy is, and what priorities we, as a society should have. No wonder it scares Democrats in Washington almost as much as Republicans.

Which brings us to Davis, California...

On a couple of autumn days when we would expect university students to be focused on (a) football and (b) getting home for Thanksgiving. After all, when we last looked at an American university campus we were watching Penn State students riot because a football coach had been fired for covering up child sexual abuse for a decade, while allowing that to continue. So Davis took us by surprise, but it also revealed a series of key questions we must be asking in our schools... in every one of our schools.

One: What can we learn from the actions of UCD PD Lt. John Pike and his fellow officers? I have watched the videos very closely, and a few things stand out clearly, beyond the "humans should never do things like this to other humans, or even most animals." Pike is so disassociated it is bizarre. He has completely separated himself from humanity, even from his own humanness. As many have said, he looks like he is spraying a rose bush for aphids. He is, to put it simply, "doing his job."

How does this happen? I am not advocating for removing personal responsibility, I agree with the United States government position from Andersonville to Nuremberg to My Lai, your orders are secondary to your humanity, and yet... as in all of those cases, the question is rarely a clean one.

I encourage you to watch the video above with your students, and also watch The Andersonville Trialor Judgment at Nuremberg, or both, and to let your students face this question: Orders and rules? Or morality and humanity?

This is a question which defines us, and though - thankfully - rarely as dramatically as in the case of Lt. Pike, it is a question which controls the course of our lives.

Two: Where were the educators? When UCD education professor Cynthia Carter Ching wrote her open letter to Davis students and faculty she apologized to the students, "You know, it wasn’t malicious.  We thought it would be fine, better even.  We’d handle the teaching and the research, and we’d have administrators in charge of administrative things.  But it’s not fine.  It’s so completely not fine.  There’s a sickening sort of clarity that comes from seeing, on the chemically burned faces of our students, how obviously it’s not fine. So, to all of you, my students, I’m so sorry.  I’m sorry we didn’t protect you.  And I’m sorry we left the wrong people in charge."

The fact is, we've become so institutionalized in so many places, that we, in education, forget what our purpose is, and as Ching says, "It's not fine."

I suggested on Twitter yesterday, "Dear University Presidents, if you find students "occupying" their own campus, sit down with them and be an educator," but this goes far beyond those at the very top, as Ching says, we all need to widen our roles, our vision, and our functions because the full environment of our educational institutions is part of our "teaching." When Michigan State University is really bad about disability rights, it quite loudly undoes much of what I try to do in the classroom. When Linda Katehi orders riot-geared police to remove a few students sitting on a lawn, it undoes so much that UCD faculty are attempting to do. Hell, every time a bell rings in our high schools or middle schools and interrupts an important conversation, we are undoing all the try to teach about learning and dignity.

So, this is a time to listen to your students. To, yes, shut up and listen. Let them record their day with the video cameras on their phones, or give them flip cameras. Let them show you what "you" - their school - is teaching. And then, truly respond to that.

Three: What does democracy mean? I remember that my father, discussing the aftermath of the World War II in which he had been a central combatant, told me that, "We all fought for the Four Freedoms, but afterwards, the U.S. decided to only worry about two, and the Russians decided to only worry about two." Once again, the inability to remember four - must be a lesson here.

My father meant that while the U.S. focused on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion, the Soviet Union focused on Freedom from Want (jobs, food, housing, health care, education for all) and Freedom for Fear (a huge border area of nations controlled to make sure that the Germans did not come back). He wasn't making excuses for either, he was faulting both.

For my father, the reason he had fought his way through the nightmares at Metz and Bastogne and Dachau, and had crossed Germany to end up in Plzen, was to assure people's rights, from America to Prague, to all four. He felt badly cheated.

I've talked about experimenting with different forms of voting before, letting our students learn options and ask questions, but this needs to go beyond that. What are the purposes of our society? What should we do together? What things are all of our responsibility? What is government supposed to be? How are decisions made? What are the rights we should all have? What are the responsibilities we should all have?

You cannot limit this to the United States or whatever nation you are in, you need to allow students the range of options contemporary societies have chosen, from French right to health care and education to the Finnish right to broadband to the East German right to long family vacations at the beach.

Democracy deserves better than a short answer. The Occupy Movement understands that, and we, with our students, need to start asking the same questions.

Happy Thanksgiving to all in the United States, and welcome to Advent to all.
- Ira Socol