Words to Ponder and Create With: Let's Develop with the Gifts of Lois Holzman's Favorite Poets and Philosophers

A 5-Week Developmental Learning Lab

Lois Holzman invites all to join her in playful encounter with brilliant world shapers / world changers whose words have served as inspiration for her eclectic “Words to Ponder” column. In this 5-week course, she introduces short passages and conversations with contemporary and historical political leaders, philosophers and poets. Building upon her popular “Become a Developmentalist” workshops, she invites participants to create a hands-on, “maker space” for collective pondering and appreciation: What can we build upon and complete with these conceptual/revolutionary “offers?” How shall we open our ears and hearts, roll up our sleeves, and play with these meaty provocations? Designed as a developmental learning lab for all who are curious, this course offers a greater fluency of appreciation – a practice in “widening our gaze,” seeing “new offers,” questioning assumptions, and creative completion.

Zoom Meeting Dates:

Sundays, October 25th, November 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd (at 12PM Eastern US Time). PLEASE NOTE: The first session (October 25th will be held at 12PM UTC-4; the remaining four sessions will be held at 12PM UTC-5).

About the “Words to Ponder” Column

Lois' curated archive of puzzling, provocative and inspirational passages include those by favorite lyricists, poets and prose writers (Pablo Neruda; Mark Twain, Pete Seeger, Nazim Hikmet, Heinrich von Kleist, Otto Rene Castillo, Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, Alberto A. Rios, A.A. Milne; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ursula K. LeGuin, Billy Collins); philosophers and public intellectuals (Bayo Akomolafe; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; Judith Butler; WVO Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Raoul Vaneigem) historians and anthropologists (Jerry Z. Muller, Daniel Graeber); educators (Maria Montessori); biologists (Oliver Sacks, Stuart Firestein); educators (Sugata Mitra); psychologists (Kenneth Gergen, Kurt Danziger, Peter Gray, Peter Smagorinsky, Steven Pinker, Jean Maria Arrigo, David Harper, Lev Vygotsky); performance activists (such as Hector Aristizabal); radical educators (Myles Horton, Viola Spolin); movement builders (Mahatma Gandi, Fred Newman), and baseball legend, Yogi Berra.

Leader Biography

East Side Institute co-founder and director Lois Holzman is an activist developmental psychologist, master teacher and internationally respected developmentalist. She is chief organizer of the Institute’s International Class in social therapeutics and founder of the Performing the World conference, nurturing practices of performance activism. She serves as Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Vygotskian Practice at UNC Greensboro and received the American Educational Research Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award from its Cultural Historical Research division. Her 10 books, which draw on discoveries from the rhizomic “development community” and independent organizing efforts in the US and globally, include: Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life; The End of Knowing; Schools for Growth; and The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World and in 2025, A Developmentalist's Guide to Better Mental Health: Navigating Everyday Life Dilemmas.