By Brendan McCarthy
I want to know what love is.
For some, this line is the title of a cheesy, power ballad from the 1980s by the band Foreigner. For me, the phrase and the song represent a simple, direct desire to understand one of the fundamental aspects of being human, love. I am interested in love songs. I am curious about their universality across almost every culture as a genre. Even if you are not one of the 493 million+ people who have listened to I Want to Know What Love Is on Spotify, it’s pretty difficult to argue against the importance of love. Certainly, when one lacks love, the pain of its absence can make life incredibly difficult. Alternately, if one loves something and has fun doing it, it’s a lot easier to do that thing…and, often, that love and fun we experience causes us to want to continue doing whatever it is.
That was my simple starting point to think about what a school could be.
As an educator, I have tried to focus on designing pedagogy, classes and curricula around questions of love: Who do you love? What community do you love? What are the key issues facing the people and communities you love? What do you love to do? In my research as a member of the Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the incredible faculty team–Dr. Amber Strong Makaiau, Dr. Chad Miller, Dr. Ben Lukey, Dr. Toby Yos, Dr. Keith Cross, Dr. Summer Maunakea and Dr. Thomas Jackson– have encouraged me to wonder deeply about the impact of love on our ability to learn. I have been exploring questions like, what is the effect of love on our brains? If a student experiences love in school in some way, could even the most traditional, objective academic subjects, like mathematics, be easier for that student to learn? (I don’t think I have met anyone who does not have a horror story about math. Feels like math, in particular, could use some love.) I started dreaming about creating courses that take traditional academic subjects and inject them with an absurd amount of love, like the Love in the Time of Mathematics or Philosophy for Lovers (I know that second one is a bit redundant). This line of inquiry eventually led me to ask the question, what would happen if we created an entire school that was completely based on love?
It all sounds great, idealistic, noble, maybe even obvious? But one major challenge is that, unlike the principles of mathematics, love is highly subjective. Everyone’s understanding and experience of love is different. There are so many different types of love–romantic love, love of family, love of friends, love of a community, love of nature, love of an animal, love of music, love of art, love of sport, love of fun, etc. Even within the same genre, every person’s experience of and perspective on love is different. I realized that if I wanted to create a school based on love, I would need to try to find out what love is and map it rigorously. It’s a completely impossible task, I know; but for some reason I gravitate towards ridiculous, impossible, dreamy tasks. Personal heroes include: Don Quijote, Walter Mitty, Aretha Franklin. I just don’t get excited about anything else. I ask a lot of impossible questions of myself and my students because I believe that, sometimes when you ask the impossible of yourself, you just might get the incredible.
For this impossible task of finding out what love is, I thought the best people to ask would be the students. Whenever I have tried to develop new curricula, the people who consistently have had the most innovative insight are students. So I want to know what love is…from the students’ perspectives. If we can understand the impossible, i.e., what love is, we might just have a chance at building incredible curricula and schools that are based in love.
Given the complexity and personal nature of love, the next challenge became how can one create a way for students to freely and expansively express their ideas and feelings around love? Love is not always the easiest thing to describe or express. Maybe this is why artists who express feelings about love in extraordinary ways that we can identify with, like Foreigner or Aretha Franklin or Beyoncé or Beethoven or Frida Kahlo or Amanda Gorman or Rei Kawakubo or Sophia Coppola, are celebrated extraordinarily by society. And while the final outcomes of great artists certainly can be captivating, the processes they explore to arrive at these outcomes can be even more fascinating. One of the most liberating aspects of my personal academic journey has been studying research and development processes for my own art and design work.
A key aspect of my graduate studies in both architecture and fine art was learning different methods that create resonances (and dissonances) with who I am and what I care about. These methods in turn help me express my identity and concepts in diverse ways. In that journey of delving into different research and development approaches, I discovered the process of making films. Filmmaking opened up a new, very free way for me to convey my ideas and emotions. My quixotic distillation and synthesis of all this is this guess:
If we tackle the impossible task of understanding what love is by developing a curriculum around filmmaking and philosophy, it might open up some new spaces for students to express their ideas and feelings, which, in turn, may generate a dynamic archive of student perspectives on love that can function as a compass to guide us as we try to think about what a school can be.
The Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has a strategic partnership with Hanahau‘oli School in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi where I am currently a scholar-in-residence. In close collaboration with my truly amazing and intrepid mentor there, Head of School Lia Woo, and my Professors Dr. Amber Strong Makaiau and Dr. Chad Miller, we have co-designed and just launched a school-wide project to explore what love is from the student perspective: The I Want to Know What Love Is Hanahau‘oli School Film Festival Project.
The I Want to Know What Love Is Film Festival Project aims to empower students to express what they love through a process-based curriculum that combines student filmmaking with critical and philosophical discourse. Our hope is that the flexibility of the medium of filmmaking combined with love-based critical-inquiry and philosophical discussions will provide an expansive terrain for students to explore and freely express their ideas about love. These explorations of what love is will form the foundation for a dynamic archive of student perspectives that can be used in the long term to develop new curricula and help support the growth and development of Hanahau’oli School as it continues to push the boundaries of what a school can and ought to be in the tradition of progressive education. The first part of the project will culminate at the end of the Spring 2022 semester with a film festival that will feature short, 30-second films made by students about love.
The project guides students through phases of:
Ideation & Visualization
Research
Philosophical discussion
Prototyping through filmmaking
Sharing of work
Critical inquiry and feedback based in love
Iteration & development informed by critical, love-based inquiry
Exhibition and sharing of work with community
Reflection
Through these stages, we introduce students to exploratory and experimental processes for creating, analyzing and iterating films with the aim of opening up new ways to express their ideas, feelings and individual perspectives. The resulting films and, maybe more importantly, the development process, will inform the overarching goals of the project to analyze, map and create a dynamic archive of cinematic, personal, unique student expressions of love to support Hanahau‘oli School in its endeavors to develop innovative, new experiences, classes, curricula and systemic school-wide strategies.
The project is deeply informed by and indebted to the work of Professor Thomas Jackson, Director of the UHM Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education, which is the home of the philosophy for Children (p4C) Hawai‘i methodology, as well as the oeuvre of Professor Thomas ‘Toby’ Yos and his essay, Raising the Bar: Love, the Community of Inquiry, and the Flourishing Life (Yos, 2012).
Students began the project in January 2022 by exploring the intersection of love and fun. All 217 students at Hanahau‘oli School were tasked with developing two separate, short films about what they, themselves, love to do for fun and what someone else in a community they care about thinks love is, respectively. The idea was to immediately help the students think about both their own ideas on love, as well as emphasize the importance of deeply considering the perspectives of others.
The students began their filmmaking journey by engaging with the question, What do you love to do for fun? through writing, drawing and “gently socratic inquiry”–– a phrase championed by Professor Thomas Jackson in his philosophy for Children (p4C) work (Jackson, 2001). Our team worked intimately with each class section, from junior kindergarten (ages 4-5) all the way up to grade 6 (ages 11-12) in guided ideation and visualization sessions in which students helped each other think of ways they might approach making a film about what they love to do for fun. A key part of these sessions was introducing students to simple, analogue ways of viewfinding/shot framing, as well as the fundamentals of moving a camera. We introduced this in conjunction with techniques to imagine and visualize ideas so students could immediately get started on actually developing their own films. Drawing upon some ideas from yoga, we integrated physical movement and breathwork strategies in concert with shot framing, camera movement and visualization efforts as a way to help students discover connections between their concepts, feelings and physical actions. Another way to phrase all this is that we introduced students to strategies that can connect the mind, heart, eyes and hands.
The students have just finished their first prototype films and we are now introducing them to a process of love-based critical inquiry, iteration, and development. In each class, students screen their initial prototype films, identify what they love about each film, and then engage in a supportive and critical discussion about the work. We use a gentle, inductive/empirical and question-based methodology. The hope is that by teaching the actual processes of critical inquiry and iterative development from a standpoint of love, students will begin to develop a set of tools that they can rely upon going forward:
Deepen and create a much more precise understanding of the concepts, ideas and feelings that they want to explore and express.
Identify and understand what is unique or of most interest to them about their own perspectives on what/who they love.
Deepen their understanding of the nature and possibilities of the time-based medium they are employing, video/film in this case.
Develop new ways to use the medium of video/film to better or more powerfully express their unique perspectives, ideas, and feelings around love that they have unearthed both through their own explorations and through critical analysis with the group.
Study the approaches and various techniques of their colleagues. Identify who they can learn from and collaborate with based on their analysis of each other’s films.
Understand the importance of critically informed and directed experimentation and iteration of one's creative work based in love.
Maybe a shorter way to say all this is that we try to help them ask questions of themselves and each other that help them create more resonance between the medium (film) and the content they want to convey. When I am making films, sometimes I like to ask myself the questions: What are the unique, fundamental characteristics of film or video as a medium that I can utilize to express my unique perspectives or concepts? What can film/video do or convey that no other media can and how can I utilize these singular properties of film in combination with the concepts and feelings I want to convey?
To get a bit more specific about the actual critique process, one of the keys is that, before we share our films, we review and discuss the principles of intellectual safety. The aim of this is to help everyone feel comfortable sharing the highly personal work that they have created around what and who they love. We want everyone to feel that they can take risks and put themselves, their ideas and personal expressions out there in a safe way.
The next thing we do is walk through a framework for the critique that will function as a lens or filter for our analysis and discussion of the prototype films. Again, starting from a point of love, we charge students with 4 key tasks while they watch and analyze the films:
Identify something you love about each film that you will share with the filmmaker.
Generate a question for each filmmaker that will help them share and articulate a deeper or more precise understanding of what they expressed through their film that they love. Sometimes, simply asking the filmmaker why they love the thing they do can help immensely in the quest for understanding, specificity and unearthing the unique perspective of the filmmaker.
Generate a question for each filmmaker that will help them share why they employed some of the filmmaking techniques they did. This part is aimed at generating awareness around all of the different technical filmmaking decisions we make when creating films, as well as illuminating some of the other options that we may not know are even available to us. This type of inquiry can help us become conscious of some of the technical filmmaking decisions that we may not have even realized we were making while creating our initial films. On a more basic, but extremely important level, this step also opens up great conversations that allow us to explore the fundamental technical or formal elements of filmmaking and the nature of film as a medium.
Through a discussion + distillation of the results of all of the above, we collectively generate more questions/ideas/options to explore and experiment with as the students iterate and develop their initial prototype films. The intention of this step is helping the filmmaker more powerfully express their unique perspectives, ideas, feelings around love that have been unearthed through critical analysis and inquiry.
In our love-based critical screening sessions, students get to know each other better on a multitude of levels. In addition to building a deep understanding of each other’s perspectives on love and fun through the content of their work, students get to see different filmmaking approaches employed by their peers and learn what skills each other has. By studying and asking questions of one another, students form a new archive of skills they can access going forward and continue to build upon by directly collaborating with each other. For example, one student might have created a stop-motion film that another student would love to learn how to do from a technical perspective. Now they know who they can go to for different topics and areas of support or collaboration.
After these love-based screening and critical analysis sessions, the next step will be for students to iterate their prototype films utilizing their learnings from these conversations, which all started from a place of love. This process of love-based, critically informed and directed experimentation and iteration (as opposed to just doing a final draft or experimenting without a sense of what one is aiming at) is crucial. We want to help students understand that exploring and learning different processes of ideation, research, making, sharing, analysis, discussion and directed iteration, all rooted in love, can support them in making films and in any other endeavor to more effectively express one’s ideas, emotions and unique perspectives. We will, of course, be premiering the students' final films at the festival, but equally important, we will be exhibiting their intricate process journeys that are clearly yielding extraordinary results already.
We are still in the early phases of the film festival project, but one thing I have immediately noticed is a major pulse of fun, excitement and positive energy that seems to be propagating around the school. As I walk across the campus courtyards, students are running up to me bursting to share what they are working on for their films or asking me if I have seen their submissions yet. I even bumped into a couple of students (ages 6 and 7) at the local grocery store and they immediately told me what they were going to do for their “iterations”. I can’t tell you how emotional it was to see them so excited and hear them use that term.
One day during recess, a group of first/second graders came up to me and asked if we all could make some movies together of them playing on the slides. I helped them use their ipads to shoot some epic scenes. We had an absolute blast that day. I immediately thought to myself, does the school have a class on sliding? Maybe it should? Sliding would have definitely been a better way for me to learn all of the equations in physics around the principles of conservation of energy.
I will keep you posted on the development of the sliding class as we attempt to somehow bridge the gap between the Newtonian and Einsteinian paradigms in physics. And, of course, I will keep you updated on how things go with the overall film festival project. I will also do my best to get you some tickets for the film festival premiere…but for now, I am sending you so much love+fun+aloha from Hanahauʻoli School and the Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate program at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu.
With Love+Fun,
brendan
PS
None of this would be possible without the support of the incredible faculty and administrative team at Hanahau'oli School and, very importantly, the unconditional love and critical feedback of my extraordinary colleagues in the Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate program at UH— Katrina, Joanne, Lisa, Royce, Tyler and Zander, and especially Michael & Emma, both of whom have collaborated with me in some of the p4C-informed sessions in the classroom.
Works Cited:
Jackson, T. (2001). The Art and Craft of “Gently Socratic” Inquiry. In A. Costa (Ed.), Developing Minds: A resource book for teaching thinking (3rd Ed) (459-465). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Yos, T. (2012). Raising the Bar: Love, the Community of Inquiry, and the Flourishing Life. Educational Perspectives, 44, Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 52-57.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brendan McCarthy is passionate about exploring the transformative possibilities of education through the intersections of his diverse academic and professional background in mathematics, economics, design, fashion, fine arts, sport and teaching. Prior to joining the University of Hawaiʻi Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy Program, Brendan was an assistant professor and Director of the undergraduate Fashion Design Program for Systems & Society + Materiality at The New School Univeristy’s Parsons School of Design in New York. At Parsons, he leveraged his unique background to develop socially engaged, collaborative, interdisciplinary, human-centered, community-specific, sustainable, systems-based curricula to support students in generating expansive, new types of outcomes and models for fashion that can have positive, transformative impacts on our world. As an integral part of this work, Brendan cultivated and led many partnership initiatives that brought global organizations from a wide range of fields to the university to engage urgent social issues in dynamic collaborative, laboratory/incubator-type educational formats. Some of these partnership projects include: United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Menstrual Health Project Kenya; United Nations (UNHCR) Kakuma, Kenya Refugee Camp Online Fashion Design Course; African Development Bank Fashionomics; Special Olympics Inclusive Design Collab; AARP Disrupt Aging in Fashion; Care+Wear Hospital Patient Gown Re-design Project; KERING EP&L (environmental profit and loss) Program; Swarovski Intentional Design Collab, Isabella Rossellini Biodiversity Farm-to-Fashion Collab; Vans Sustainability Collab.
Brendan received his BA in Mathematics from Columbia University, MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, and studied Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Before his transition to art, design and education, he worked in finance for Morgan Stanley as a global high yield research analyst.
On a personal level, Brendan is a lover of sport, the environment and culinary arts. He is an avid surfer, swimmer, lover of the ocean, lifelong tennis player/coach, golfer, runner, cyclist, football (aka soccer in some places) fan, and yoga practitioner. He loves sitting down for tea on the daily with his friends and family.
Currently, Brendan is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a Scholar-Residence at Hanahau‘oli School in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Brendan has a dream to start a school based in love and fun that combines traditional academic subjects, like mathematics and philosophy, with different disciplines like sport, art and design.
