Humanizing Teaching with Dramatic Inquiry: Keynote by Brian Edmiston at the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2024

Humanizing Teaching with Dramatic Inquiry: Keynote by Brian Edmiston at the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2024

Brian Edmiston

DOI: 10.64741/504362yltkbr

This article is the text of the Keynote delivered by Brian Edmiston at the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2024.

At this precipitous moment, it’s wonderful to be here with friends and colleagues who understand the power of drama as education.
We know a lot about the effectiveness of using drama for learning, and how to empower students to have more agency though we’re still discovering more about the complexities of how teaching can make such learning possible.

Why struggle to learn how to teach with drama so that our teaching might be more humanizing?
I offer three reasons:

• First, drama is not only about life – it is life. Like each of the arts drama can be humanizing. With drama we can bring our humanity – and embrace the students’ humanity in classrooms deadened by incessant testing and imposed scripted curricula that have infected schools world-wide. Drama can be a curriculum for life.
• Second, creating drama connects us as people and can connect us – teachers and students – with any facet of the world that we might want to learn about by inquiry. What I’ve called dramatic inquiry – using drama to inquire into and learn about aspects of life – is an antidote to the dehumanizing powerful forces that commodify education and the dehumanizing people who profit in scapegoating and divisions.
• Third, drama is a joyful effervescent face-to-face person-to-person social art of in person experiences that can be more engaging for students who might rather be on their phones [lifting my phone].
  Hey Siri, anything better I could be doing? So,
• Be thankful that we are in person not doing an online e-course.
• Say Hi to the person beside you.
• And put down your phones for the next half-an-hour! 

Let’s think together about how we might become more humanizing teachers using drama.

I’m going to explore 5 Big Ideas.
First, teaching at its heart is HUMANIZING DIALOGUE.
Whether or not we are using drama, because dialogue is how we make sense and share meaning – it’s how we learn about the world and about our humanity in relation to others

1. HUMANIZING DIALOGUE – it’s how we learn about life

Anyone play tennis“““` or table tennis or pickleball?
Back-and-forth, giving-and-receiving-and-giving-and-receiving a ball, feels like yes, and … yes, and … yes! That’s a great point!
Good conversations are similar to the flow of a ball game:
Back-and-forth, giving-and-receiving-and-giving-and-receiving meaning, feels like yes, and … yes, and … yes! Great point!

In good conversations we’re in dialogue when we’re both making sense, when there’s a flow of meaning through, among, and between us in our back-and-forth yes-and exchanges.
Not just using words in our social interactions but also via our use of space, gesture, and movement in relation to other people
It’s multimodal meaning-making
It’s we-for-us meaning-making
You make a great point! So do you!
Yes, and yet … I’m wondering what if …

So maybe we should just stop now and have a discussion!
And I am looking forward to doing that throughout the weekend.

Giving a keynote is not my preferred teaching mode!
Yet meaning can be made in dialogue even when only one person is talking or moving or dancing etc.

Though I’m talking right now, we’re in dialogue when you’re bringing some of what you know and can do as you listen to make sense of what I’m saying and doing – or dancing relative to everyone else.

We’re in dialogue if you’re following my drift about a topic
If you’re metaphorically saying ‘yes’ to my ideas ‘and’ adding on what you might be wondering while taking mental or actual notes, about what you might say or do in response.

The flow of meaning-making in dialogue can happen both via social interactions – like with the person beside you – and via inner speech – like when you experience talking to yourself.

What’s dialogue got to do with humanizing teaching?
Dialogue is how we learn.
It’s how we act with agency to make meaning and sense of life.
Teaching at its heart is humanizing dialogue.

Working with a class of 5- and 6-year-old children just before the pandemic we are imagining that we’re a team of firefighters. We’re planning what and how to teach new recruits about how we-as-firefighters work together and stay safe when helping those who need our help.

We’re reenacting the time we rescued a cat (represented by a puppet) which is stuck up a tree (represented by a drawing on the board) while comforting her owner, Mr. Green (represented by me).
The children have been working out how they might use a ladder, a hose, and even an axe.
Ten-minutes into our work I notice Xavier sitting out with his teacher, Mary. He’d been with a special education teacher when we began.

When I invite Xavier to join us, Mary tells me that he doesn’t want to imagine being a firefighter. He wants to pretend to be a police officer. Yes-anding, I tell Xavier that lots of police officers help firefighters. Noticing him eyeing the wooden helicopter on the table near him I bring it over and hold it out, make a whirling sound, and say, ‘Do you want to imagine that we’re police officers flying up to help rescue the cat?’ As I move the copter just out of reach, Xavier reaches out and rises. Seconds later he’s flying the helicopter.

With the other children, I narrate our successful rescue. Some other children offer suggestions, for example, how a person could be lowered from the copter. We agree that because of the wind from the copter the cat could fall but that we’ll catch it with our life safety net. Everyone cheers including Xavier as we catch the puppet with a piece of fabric which we hold taut.

Soon he and his peers are all drawing rescue stories.

When we’re teaching we’re ideally in back-and-forth multimodal dialogue that includes every student acting with intention, with agency.
Each is always making personal sense as well as being in meaningful dialogue with one another as well as with us.

But I’m in trouble if my students – or you right now – only experience monologue.
Exchanges are monologues when there is no back-and-forth.
No flow of meaning. When it’s all about my ideas. All about me.
Not about us. Not about our relationship.

There is no game of tennis when we only serve
There is no teaching or learning when it’s only me talking
There must be back-and-forth dialogue

A flow of meaning-making about anything
From teaching to learning
From Shakespeare to teaching strategies
From how to confer to how to run an engaging conference

Ideally, as you listen you keep yes-anding, metaphorically or actually saying, Yes, great point! And I’m wondering … 

The meaning we make when we dialogue is humanizing
when it’s affirming or empowering.
Yes. You have such important ideas. Can you help us with this?

But the meaning we make is dehumanizing
when it’s disempowering, dismissive or demonizing.
When there’s no wondering. No relationship.
No. Don’t be so stupid. You can’t trust those sorts of people.

Drama is ideally filled with meaningful humanizing dialogue among people acting with agency, with intention whether or not they are dramatizing events or analyzing them.

In other words, drama is ideally dialogic and humanizing.

Though be careful.
Exchanges can be highly monologic.
Is only the teacher
or only some of the students doing most of the talking?
When you were at school,
did you feel you were not heard? Not seen? That you didn’t matter?

And be cautious.
Dialogue can be dehumanizing.
Anyone remember being made to answer?
Or humiliated when you did?
Or put-down behind your back?
Or feeling uncomfortable with how people’s lives were being stereotyped or dismissed?

Ideally teaching with or without drama should be ongoing humanizing dialogue.

But when I first started teaching,
Though I knew about the back-and-forth of tennis
I knew nothing about the back-and-forth of dialogue – humanizing or not.

I’d never heard of yes-and.
I didn’t know that yes-and was the first rule of improvisation – creating meaning together in dialogue –
not telling someone else what to do, or what to think.

Stop talking.
Just keep reading and it’ll make sense
Didn’t we cover that last time?

Now if teaching at its heart is HUMANIZING DIALOGUE.
Dehumanizing monologue is deadly in the classroom.

That’s my first big idea: engage as much as possible in human-to-human dialogue when you’re teaching and resist drifting into dehumanizing monologue

My second big idea is to do with managing

2. MANAGING an inquiry project to learn about aspects of life in another world]

I was supposed to be teaching Macbeth to the ‘bottom’ set of 14-year-old boys.
Mac who?
Like most beginning teachers my managing wasn’t going so well.

Get your books out. We’re on page 13.
Why are you late?
Please, sit down.
You’ve already been to the toilet.
(These kids are driving me crazy and it’s only November!)

Managing was much easier in the Spring after I took the students to London.
It was 2 ½ hours by bus from Bath.
2 ½ magical hours in the Young Vic theatre.
And 2 ½ hours animated conversations on the return.

Back in our classroom, there was now lots of humanizing dialogue
as we remembered our shared experiences as an audience in London:

• Did you see the sparks flying when they fought with those swords?
• Lady Macbeth looked demented when she was sleepwalking
• I was wondering if the blood on Macbeth’s severed head was real!
• Would Malcolm be a good king? Better than Macbeth!
• Are Ian McKellen and Judi Dench famous, sir?
• I’ve never heard of them. Maybe they will be one day

In the classroom, text that had previously been dead words on a page became a portal to another world

When we imagined together
It was the first time I felt I was having fun
while learning with the students.

What’s that got to do with managing?

Over a couple of weeks, I began to realize that when I was managing students as if they were mounting a traitor’s head ‘upon our battlements’ or as if they were showing us how ‘to smile and smile and be a villain’ in an imagined world then I was also managing students in our classroom world.

Two worlds,
A classroom world and an imagined story world – or drama world – thank you, Cecily –                               
Classroom world and drama world both alike in dignity, is always ‘where we set our scene.’

I was beginning to understand that good teaching, like staging a production, is managing a project

Not managing generic students.
Not managing behavior for compliance.
Not managing a classroom devoid of the imagined lives of characters.

So, my second big idea is this:
teaching with drama I am always using my power for us in MANAGING an inquiry project
to learn about aspects of life in another world
as all engage in HUMANIZING DIALOGUE

Teaching with drama, we’re always in a classroom world of real people that extends into a drama world of imagined people

A what-is classroom world of social stability
In relation to a what-if drama world of possibility

In a drama world we may encounter and dialogue from the viewpoints of characters in dramatized events where they -and we – may be doing almost anything we imagine
From murder to mayhem, from marriage to mysterious events.

In our classroom world
we can make more sense of our humanity – and inhumanity – by encountering and dialoguing with one another about our shared imagined experiences of facets of life.

When students engage, they do as people in dialogue always moving between those two worlds.

Students engage when they have choice within structure.
When they can dialogue in relation to different possibilities
What if …
What if we were with Macbeth on his way to Duncan?

Form two lines.
Who wants to walk in between?
Everyone else speak what you imagine might be in Macbeth’s mind as he approaches the sleeping king
Those on the left – why might he want to kill him?
Those on the right – why might he believe he shouldn’t?

In dialogue students can consider how anyone might become more humane or more inhumane
Macbeth didn’t have to kill Duncan.
What if he’d listened to his friend, Banquo?

We interpret narrative events in dialogue.
Both as ‘us’ and as if we are characters who are ‘not-us yet are us.’
In contrast, in monologue there is no alternative viewpoint: no yes-ands, no what-ifs?

Students may act with agency yet be stuck with their first ideas, with their opinions, with their stereotypes, with their prejudices.
Macbeth was just an idiot!
Yet first ideas can become second ideas in dialogue
Yes and, I wonder how an idiot could tell a tale full of sound and fury?

No other world?
No choice?
Limp structure?
Then we have poor management
Diminishing engagement.
Dissipating dialogue
Meaningless learning.

I wish I could say that after that trip to London there had been a magical transformation in my teaching and thus in students learning via engaging projects.

Yet back then I only had a glimmer of the big idea that teaching with drama I am always using my power for us as I MANAGE an inquiry project to learn about aspects of life in another world

It’s taken me years to clarify these ideas via my dialogue with colleagues and with myself as I’ve reflected on teaching of which I’ve been proud as well as those interactions that I regret. 

I still must be cautious not to retreat to managing through dehumanizing monologic control of behavior
Stop talking! You’re supposed to be listening!
Using my power only for me not for us my teaching life is in danger of becoming a ‘walking shadow’ that is ‘signifying nothing’ worthwhile for the students.

Though managing is essential, managing is never enough.
I want my teaching to be significant for students by ‘holding the mirror up to nature.’
By drawing on the vitality and ideas – and ideals of everyone [opening arms] in the room.

To explore more of the complexities of life in ongoing inclusive dialogue I must know how to direct a group working as an ensemble.

So, my third big idea is this: teaching with drama I am always using my power for us in DIRECTING an ensemble while MANAGING an inquiry project as we all engage in HUMANIZING DIALOGUE about aspects of life.

3. DIRECTING an ensemble

Two years before I began teaching I was part of an ensemble on stage at the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich. I really should have been burning the midnight oil in the solicitors’ office.
But I’d fallen in love with drama.
And out of love with becoming a lawyer.

Ian Emerson, our professional director, was directing us as an ensemble
Everyone mattered on stage – and off
Even me carrying a spear.

I mattered as much as the seasoned actor
Who was wearing a crown to represent
Henry, king of England, fourth of that name.
Though I spoke only a few dozen lines as Sir Walter Blunt I felt integral to the ensemble that worked as a team to create Shakespeare’s world.
I felt I belonged in a we-for-us collaborative.

We were collectively imagining
We were in an ongoing dialogue that included everyone and excluded no one

We were moving between the world of the Maddermarket Theatre and Shakespeare’s world.

Our dialogue was humanizing the lives of other people.
We were collectively imagining a medieval monarch facing down a rebellion a year after leading his own rebellion against his cousin, King Richard.
We were inquiring into how people use power: to keep or restore order? for revenge? for me? for us?
Why had Richard taken Henry’s lands?
Had Henry wanted Richard murdered?
What can a leader do when the fighting ends?

The characters on stage dialogued about questions like these.
Off-stage we mused on such questions too.
Two worlds: the drama world and our everyday world
In both it felt that everyone’s ideas were valued as we inquired into aspects of life contextualized by events in Shakespeare’s world

It was the 1970’s.
Via this collaborative drama I was feeling and thinking and inquiring about the inhumanity, and the humanity, of people caught up in civil war.

In my heart and mind, the unreality of drama was resonating with the stark reality of the civil strife in Northern Ireland where I had grown up.

As Falstaff muses on honor and life amid violence and death at the battle of Shrewsbury and over my prone body representing Sir Walter Blunt killed defending his king, I was in an uncomfortable inner dialogue with images of destruction and death in the divided community of Derry-Londonderry where I had come of age. wondering who was brave, and who was resisting, and for what?

I am still wondering about bravery, resistance, and what people hope for and might kill or die for in current sites of violence and death from Gaza to Ukraine, in ongoing dialogue that I struggle to make as humanizing as possible.

The dialogue has continued.
Using dramatic inquiry working as an ensemble with and alongside students, we can always work as a team to deepen and complexify everyone’s understanding about how and why people use power to do what.

And how we might use power to accomplish or achieve something that we believe is more humanizing. 

When I was employed as a secondary English teacher in England and then as head of Drama, I aspired to direct my classes as ensembles in the ways Ian Emerson had done.

In contrast to the institutional divisions and discrimination in my hometown and throughout the world in my classrooms all would be equally valued. Everyone would be regarded as a whole feeling-thinking-moving social and cultural being.

I would use my power to create collaborative communities where all ideas would be considered when talking about or dramatizing imagined events about any topic, serious or playful.

We’d welcome one another like friends.
People of any age can be colleagues.

Six years into teaching that was my we-for-us ideal.
My hopeful future.

Yet that feeling of unity could be fleeting in the classroom.
I didn’t move closer to that reality until the year I spent in Newcastle working with Dorothy Heathcote on my master’s course.

My fourth big idea is that teaching with drama I am always using my power for us in LEADING an ensemble on a journey as well as DIRECTING the group while MANAGING an inquiry project as all engage in HUMANIZING DIALOGUE about aspects of life

4. LEADING an ensemble on a journey

Dorothy was a leader.
In any classroom she was more than managing a project to engage everyone.
More than directing people to create as an ensemble.

Dorothy was leading people on journeys where all could learn from and with one another in humanizing dialogue that always extended into inquiry focused on grappling with challenges in accomplishing something worthwhile, raising important questions, finding clarity, and realizing new understandings about aspects of life in both the classroom world and any drama world

For half-a-dozen years, my journey to become a better teacher had felt like taking solo day trips in the foothills of drama teaching strategies.
Get into groups. Show us your ideas.
I’m in role now as …

After seeing video of Dorothy in the classroom – like many I had been captivated by Three Looms Waiting – I was clear that I had to work with her, if I wanted to learn how to teach more like her

Arriving in Newcastle, I was welcomed into a team that soon became an ensemble intent on climbing in the mountains of drama as education.

Leading, for Dorothy, meant that she knew where she was going and where she wanted us to go and why.

The beginning of our master’s journey with her was focused by a group project
Each year on her course she organized a week-long visit to Earls House.

Earls House was a school for children and a residency for adults all of whom had special needs.
At that time residents were classified as ‘mentally handicapped’ due to a diagnosis of anything from Down’s Syndrome to brain damage.

Dorothy led her us on a mythic journey as an ensemble that included the residents

At Earls House she wanted us to learn how to work as an ensemble intended to include all adult residents in the room regardless of their apparent capabilities or assumed knowledge

From the beginning she wanted us to learn how to teach without relying on tricks that we might have used in the comfort of our previous situations.
They wouldn’t work at Earls House.

As she once said, she wanted us to ‘rely not simply on what you know but on who you are.’
She wanted us to learn how to have humanizing dialogue regardless of how residents responded.
To more often have ‘Yes, and …’ interactions about some aspect of life that mattered to the residents.

She wanted us to learn how to engage the residents via pageantry and spectacle rather than rely merely on words.
We could connect via how we appeared and showed – via what we signed – not just by what we said.

One-on-one we would have to do more listening with the heart than talking with the mouth.

When we arrived in the day room for about 25 adults
Some residents mostly rocked in their chairs.
Some would call out without apparent reason.
Some insisted on being hugged.

Some had also been waiting for Dorothy to return.
Like Tom.
He was on his feet when we entered in a procession playing tambourines with jingling bells and singing

We Three Queens of Orient are
Bearing gifts, we traverse afar,
Field and fountain,
Moor and mountain,
Following yonder star

Some of those in chairs looked up, attentive.
They’re following a star!
Could you help us make sense of these star maps?
Some touch the bright maps we show them that we had made the day before that
Some don’t.

Have you seen our husbands? They’re kings.
Some are captivated by the queens’ sparkling crowns and finger their glittering gowns

They set off without the gifts!
Do you like this gold? Bright!
Do you want to touch this myrrh? It’s creamy!
Do you like the scent of this incense? Smelly!

Yes, and …
We dialogue and connect human-to-human

As teachers being led on this journey by Dorothy, we were learning to pay attention to others to pay attention, to the effect of what we did to respond with a yes-and without only relying on words.

Being led on this journey by Dorothy, the residents who must often have felt alone in their own world, are engaged beyond the literal and the mundane by sounds and movements and costumes and snippets of stories that draw them into another place in a mythic world with universal problems.

They’re looking for a baby –
Do you know how to sooth a crying baby?
A few take blankets and join in pretending to rock dolls
Many join in as we sing
Away in a Manger
No crib for a bed

When Dorothy believes that they are ready for a more intense encounter she nods at me, and I appear as King Herod brandishing my grandfathers’ blackthorn stick.
I’m yelling
Where are the babies?
Tom and others leap forward to get between Herod and the women holding the babies
They yell at him to go away.
There are cheers when I-as-Herod slink off.

On this journey residents who were too often allowed to be passive
With us were intentional – they had agency
They were able to explore how they might care for and actively protect the vulnerable

Too often left physically and emotionally isolated
With us they experienced their humanity as we did as they connected and bonded with one another and with us while confronting and overcoming an angry dehumanizing bully

Then, as our procession moved on all were watching, most were smiling and waving
We were singing a song suggested by a resident
Show Me the Way to Go Home …

That year in Newcastle, as we faced uncertainties, practical and theoretical I felt supported in taking risks

Dorothy was generous with her time, her expertise, her humor, her humanity, and the depth of her inquiry into foundational issues

That year, I gradually challenged the educational status quo.
I’m now clear that education isn’t fixed desks, dusty texts, rigid curricula, or abstract standards.
Education is a living journey of inquiry and discovery on which we may laugh and cry together as we dialogue to consider how and why people do what they do and how we might respond with humanity to make life a bit better for more people.

Dorothy was a leader.
Dorothy knew her purpose, her why.
She knew what she stood for, what she valued
She envisioned a hopeful humanizing future for education
She spent a lifetime inquiring into and showing in her practice how any classroom can be enlivened: serious yet joyful, playful yet rigorous.
Gleaning insights from existing knowledge whether in professional writings or students’ anecdotes to create new meaning for all about aspects of our humanity.

Reflecting with us on our practice as well as on her teaching we extended dialogue into inquiry into how to become more responsive, more caring, more vigorous, more collaborative, more humanizing teachers.

That year, reflecting with students of all ages using whatever capabilities and knowledge they brought to the work we dialogued to inquire into facets of life contextualized in human events that we dramatized and analyzed.

5. MENTORING individuals to accomplish more than they could alone.

Look closely at the video of the work at Earls House.
You’ll see Dorothy standing close to individual residents,
making eye contact,
encouraging,
supporting,
speaking with them
as people
as equals

Dorothy is mentoring
As she did with us throughout that year, she was helping the residents accomplish more than they could alone.

My fifth, and final, big idea is that when teaching with drama I’m using my power in MENTORING individuals to accomplish more than they could alone.

When we’re managing a project, directing an ensemble, and leading on a journey, we’re paying attention to the needs of the whole group.
We’re in dialogue with the whole community.

Yet that’s not enough.
We must pay attention to and mentor individuals.
At times our dialogue must be focused on personal needs and individual’s hopes and dreams.

In effect, we’re saying
I’m there for you. I’m-with-you. I’ll listen to you.
I’ll dialogue and inquire with you human-to-human.  

So that I can help you clarity your feelings and thoughts and wishes
So that you may share ideas with one another in social situations
So that all might make sense and create meaning as they reflect and dialogue and inquire with us, with one another, and with themselves about aspects of life within and beyond the classroom.

So that over time all those we work with may grow into more knowledgeable, more responsible, more competent, and more humanizing people.

I remember when I first visited Tim Taylor in his classroom two decades ago.
I was doing a bit of mentoring with him as he was shifting from P4C to using drama.
I had encouraged him to take one of the problems his ten- and eleven-year-old children were philosophizing about and get up it on its feet.
We had a lot of fun imagining we were a rescue team in space
As we got ready for lunch, Tim was sitting side-by-side quietly talking with one of the boys.
He was mentoring one of the boys in his class.  
Whereas I had been focused on the whole group
Tim had also been attentive to the needs of individuals.

As I listened in to hear Tim’s skillful humanizing dialogue focus on agreeing what needed to happen so that the child could rejoin the group, Tim had also been mentored me.

Tim was there for that child
to clarify,
raise questions,
support,
imagine alternatives,
and resolve a problem.

The boy took responsibility for the inappropriate behavior that I had missed.
He wanted to be with his friends and agreed:
OK no put-downs of other people
That afternoon the boy was excited taking on another rescue mission.  

That same year I met and worked with Iona for the first time.
Since then, we’ve mentored one another as we’ve dialogued and collaborated in teaching.

Read any of the examples in our book, Humanizing Education with Dramatic Inquiry, and you’ll see Iona mentoring individual students.

Her fifteen-month commission at a college in South Wales with young people designated as ‘at risk of NEET’ is inspiring.

They took on a project focused on the life of the actor, Richard Burton, who like them had grown up near Port Talbot.
Commissioned by the area library to introduce people to this famous local son, they researched, wrote and then dramatized scenes for a video.

Read how Iona mentors David, who grows from a boy afraid of joining in to become a leader who, a year later, presents with confidence about their project to incoming students.

Follow the story of Karl
He begins the year with his head down on a desk and ends having filmed and edited a video of the work.

Notice how Assim moves from talking about wanting to write to working with a group and actually creating scenes for the video that captivated a gala evening attended by professional filmmakers as well as parents and all those who had contributed to making the project such a success.
I was lucky enough to be there as well.  

SUMMARIZING – where we’ve travelled

How might we become more humanizing teachers with dramatic inquiry?

I think of teaching as anything you do to make a difference to learning.
It’s how you use your power.
You make a difference. You matter.
You bring your humanity to the humans in your classroom.

We humanize our teaching and students’ learning when we use our power to inquire with students

So that they might learn to become kinder, more helpful, more open to other’s interpretations of stories, more tolerant, more capable of collaborating, while becoming more knowledgeable and skillful about aspects of our increasingly complex world. 

I’ve been arguing that
Teaching at its heart is humanizing dialogue – yes-anding one another as whole human beings – to make more sense and create more shared meaning about whatever facets of life we want to learn more about with our students.

Teaching with drama is using our power for all of us in the classroom community, managing an inquiry project as we learn about aspects of life, contextualized by engaging events in another world that we may dramatize.
Our teaching is directing: an inclusive ensemble to which all feel they belong.
Our teaching is leading students on a journey – we can lead with purpose grounded by our humanizing values.
Our teaching is mentoring – we can mentor every individual student to be more of the person they hope to become.

Teaching can make a humanizing difference.
It matters that we show up as human beings for the human beings in our care.
It matters how we show up to explore aspects of the lives of other beings in our complex yet beautiful natural world while also exploring aspects of our own humanity.

Let me end with two quotes from Dorothy:
She reminds us of the humanizing grounding of all our work:

All my ideas … are rooted in the remarkable variations of human encounters

In this deeply troubling time, she also stresses that we need to know who we are as we show up. We must ask ourselves:

What do I really stand for?
What issues am I ready to do battle for?’

Note on Author

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