The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings

V: New Resources

V After the Perm State talk, I returned to England to be visiting American professor at the Curriculum Laboratory of the University of London Goldsmiths' College. My participation there helped me to experience individual initiative within a group dynamic, and to experience the life process of persons as in itself creative. Its extraordinary founder and director, Charity James, has written about the work of this Lab in her book Young Lives at Stake. She helped me to accept how all our lives are at stake; adults as well as the young need to be affectionate toward self. Reports of my work were published by the Lab, and are included here. "New Resources" was contributed to Ideas, a periodical publication of the Curriculum Lab, edited by Leslie A. Smith. It appeared in No. 5, January 1968. I had written it the previous autumn, after my term'swork. The title "New Resources" was taken from the theme of Pilot Course Seven, of which I was a member. Beginning in 1965, the Lab worked each term on full-time courses with inservice secondary school teachers and administrators, between a dozen and a score, to explore for themselves some special aspect of current needs in education, in company with a Focus Group of five continuing individuals, one of them a visitor from America. My associates were Charity James, Leslie Smith, Edwin Mason, Sam Mauger — and our indispensable secretary Mary Darby. The title of the news sheet, Ideas, came partly from the initials I D E (Inter-Disciplinary Enquiry), which was the foremost aspect of a fourfold curriculum proposed by the Lab. Ideas has grown into a larger publication (now distributed in this country), though the Lab itself has ceased. How I came to work with this group has the hand of destiny in it: When I arrived in England in November, 1966, to study for four weeks in Sussex, my only friend in London, Molly Francis, welcomed me with a book by Seonaid Robertson called Rosegarden and Labyrinth : A Study in Art Education, which her bookseller John Watkins had recommended. I devoured it, wrote Miss Robertson a fan letter, sent it to Goldsmiths' College, where the jacket copy said she worked. I went to Paris for Christmas and New Years, with Paulus Berensohn, to visit potters Fance Frank and Francine del Pierre. Just before leaving for home, I received a much-forwarded letter from Seonaid Robertson saying she had been in America for a term at Penn State University, was just back in England, and would I visit her. I stopped in London to say goodbye to Molly and to meet Seonaid. She invited me to lunch at Goldsmiths'; there she told me about the interdisciplinary adventures of the Curriculum Lab, knowing from my life and work that I would be happy to hear. Charity James came into the refectory, Seonaid introduced us, Charity invited me to join a meeting of the Lab that afternoon, and very shortly she invited me to join the group as visiting professor. I said I had to go home to give 66 a talk at Penn State! Go,she said, and come back. I did.We have all become great friends. I spent the rest of the year 1967 in England and Scotland, making an important pilgrimage to the holy isle of lona and to the Pictish stones in Glamis and Meigle. New Resources 'HAT is the source of a new thought? — or a story or picture or poem or song or dance? When children or adults say, "I don't know what to make" or Tm not creative," how can they be helped to find sources for making? I would like to discuss here how the making of things and ideas and relationships leads to new resources in persons and in social forms. In Course Seven of the Curriculum Laboratory at Goldsmiths' College, we were given an assignment by our graphics teacher to make an abstract picture of a civil riot by stamping with a potato stamp. First we looked at some examples of abstract forms, and discussed what kind of movement was characteristic of rioters and police. We were asked to remember that the white space (empty or negative space) would be part of the total form and would contribute to it. We were to be mindful of the interaction of filled and empty space and to notice how the filled space was molded by the empty space. Then the teacher turned on a tape recording...