By Lois Holzman, Taos Associate and East Side Institute Director

This is the first Valentine I’ve sent since I placed my hand-made, heart-shaped bright red card on the desk of a boy named Ralph in second grade. I tend to stay away from commercial holidays, this one in particular*, and my expressions of love and appreciation are more spontaneous and frequent than Hallmark’s. But since you’re reading this in February and it’s kind of a love letter, a Valentine it is.

How could I not love the Taos Institute, having lived nearly all my life as a social constructionist (unaware for half of it)? How could I not appreciate having a far more elegant name for what I and my colleagues at the Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition called “the person-environment interface” back in the late 1970s? How could I not appreciate the years of work devoted to creating a space to incubate and nurture and grow and transform social construction-ism and -ists? How could I not deeply appreciate the welcoming of social therapeutics as a form of social constructionism and the willingness to occasionally become dance partners over the decades? And how can I not love the gentleness of Taos’ language and how every phrase is an invitation?

A dance of difference. That’s how Ken Gergen once characterized our relationship. By “our” I mean his and the Taos Institute’s relationship with me, Fred Newman and the East Side Institute and its broader development community. So, while our critiques of psychology and education are remarkably similar and our practices are compatible, our roots, histories and locations are very different—making conversations and collaborations sites for creating meaning together.

Fred and I both left academia to create what we called, in the early days, independent anti-institutions. We began our work with rather dogmatic Marxist politics, transforming at the turn of this century into a postmodern Marxism more compatible with social constructionism. Our discovery of the power of performance comes from the theatre and Vygotsky’s insights on child development as a socio-cultural-historical joint activity. As does our emphasis on the group, the ensemble, as the unit of development/qualitative transformation of people, communities, and the world. As do our views on language and its relationship to meaning making and world changing.

It was through the Taos Institute that Fred and I learned about postmodernism — what a great contribution that was! And it was with Taos that we created the conditions to find and meet and work with activists and progressives for whom performance and play and the creative arts are generative, improvisational activities of reconstructive (as opposed to deconstructive) power — the spark from which the emerging global performance activism movement came into being. For me, the recent Taos 2022 Gathering event, “Unfolding Dialogues: Relational Resources for Global Good,” was reconstructive power at its best.

While perhaps the stridency is gone, slogans remain in the Institute’s repertoire of ways to make meaning. Here are some of my favorites: From years ago, “Don’t Mourn, Organize!” and “Don’t Explain!” And from current days, “All Power To The Developing!” and “We Perform, Therefore, We Become.”

I am eager to connect with all of you and continue to perform the becoming of new relationships.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Governments, corporations, and political parties focus on goals, products and results. They have agendas, make plans, set objectives— with no way to realize them. Goals, agendas, analyses, programmatics, and adherence to ideologies can feel comforting at first, but given that human (and other) life is an ongoing, unending process — and processes are inherently unknowable — goals soon become burdens that weigh us down and drown social movements attempting to improve the quality of life. Details available here.

The book introduces the Constructionist Research Design Process as a framework for research that is creative, transformative and innovative. It can be used by any professional and researcher who wants to develop creative inquiry and to promote social change. It integrates the theory of social construction with the tools of design thinking, challenging the concept of dualisms in research such as quantitative/qualitative and subjective/objective. The focus is on the complex relational achievement required to construct a worldview where different relational (research) processes construct different realities (knowledge). In this sense, all truths are contextual truths, co-created in a specific time and useful to a specific context.