On April 15, 2010, the De Anza College Office of Instruction, Office of Diversity and ICCE, and Office of Staff and Organizational Development presented their annual conference devoted to student success. The event, “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” brought together both students and faculty and was a huge success.  To facilitate an extension of the ideas generated that day, Tom deWit was invited to present  on June 10, 2010, at a followup event he called “The Space In Between.”  Tom arrived with his team of collaborators from the Faculty Inquiry Network  who staged the space by placing numerous soccer flags all around the front of the room–a visual metaphor for the “labyrinth of attitudes.”

Labyrinth of Attitudes Activity

The opening activity invited student and faculty attendees to read and consider the following quote from James Baldwin:

“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person.” (The Fire Next Time p. 44).

After analyzing and discussing  the quote in its own right, attendees were then asked to apply the quote to the arena of Education. To enrich that discussion, a short text-film meditation was also shown. On colored handout stickies, attendees then wrote down their responses to the question: What attitudes can fill up the space in between teacher and student or student and institution? The responses broke into two general categories: negative and positive attitudes. (The responses can be found here.)

The dialogue then deepened around a series of questions:

♥ What do you do as a learner or as a teacher to inspire a labyrinth of attitudes?

♥ How do we defy the inertia we work inside of?

♥ How do we engage and  honor the labyrinth so that learning is a creative, effective and positive experience?

First Kiss with Your Discipline/ Learning:

These questions lead into a discussion of the role of Love in Education. Attendees wrote responses to a prompt that asked them about their “First Kiss”–that is, the first time they recall really loving learning. (The insightful and moving responses can be linked to here.) The ensuing discussion served as an effective springboard into the second half of the day.

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Bringing Love into The Classroom/ Learning Assignment

For the second half of the day, attendees first were shown an excerpt from Door Number One, a film made by students from Chabot College. The excerpt delves into the emotional and affective dimension that students bring with them when they first arrive at college and enter the “labyrinth.”

Tom then lead the attendees through a Live-Learning exercise that explored the following questions. Attendees worked in groups, sharing ideas and experiences; they then collaborated to create written responses. The responses are linked here.

Prompts for Live Learning Assignment

♥ What do you need to do to bring your discipline, learning into the classroom so that it can be fallen in love with?
♥ How will you constructively leverage the labyrinth, with some lovin’?
♥ What are the conditions for love to flourish?
♥ This is about claiming your own learning; everything we will discuss is already in you and we are going to honor you by creating a space to bring it out…

Prompt Supplements

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous foam rubber that we have substituted for it. (43).♥

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth” (95).♥

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