Integrating the Best of Us
“To live creatively is the most rewarding path. It will support you to seek your highest expression, your most authentic self, you in all your modalities, with an integrated masculine and feminine, an integration of your spiritual and your physical bodies, an integration of your rational and your emotional selves. All of these parts working together, collaboratively, not competitively.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote Address: Integrating the Best of Us. Connecting Schools and Communities Conference, June 25, 2008. Melbourne, Australia
Stepping up to an Activist’s Consciousness
“In a nutshell, I would say consistent creative practice expands our sight, our vision, our judgment, and our ability to solve problems. Best of all it brings perspective. With perspective, we have the confidence to navigate unexplored territory. We stand at the edge of the known world. We are at the end of a very long era dominated by “the cultivation of external power applied.” But our ability to extract and control resources, including people, things, and every nook and cranny of mother nature, has left us in a tenuous state. In our voracious consumption of all things, we are now approaching what looks like an edge.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote Address: Signs of Hope: Steeping up to an Activist’s Consciousness, Sustainable Communities Conference, March 2007. Seattle, WA
The Value of Introspection
“What could be more beautiful and powerful that traveling inside ourselves to find our very own star -- the one that burns deeply in all of us but we forget about so often because of our endless fascination with the “stars” outside us. It’s our own star that holds all the wisdom and clarity required to create a Seattle--to create a world--that is both beautiful and free.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from : A Community Presentation: The Value of Introspection. Seattle Foundation’s 60th Anniversay, May 16, 2006. Seattle, WA
Walking in the World
“We’ve always known that our consciousness is limited, especially in the amount of information we can actually absorb. While we receive 40 milllion bits of data--sensory input from the world around us at any given moment--we can only be conscious of 40 of these bits. This is because of the reticular activator in our brains which filters information out so we are not flooded with what we cannot possibly process consciously. However, we’re still absorbing those remaining millions of bits, though it goes into an unconscious reservoir of mostly inaccessible information. The good news is that the person sitting next to you will see some of what you can’t see. So to make sense of reality, we need each other and the full range of perspectives that other people hold.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote: A Commencement Address: Walking in the World. March 2006, Arts Institute of Seattle
Creativity = Self-actualization
“Research has shown that we are our most creative when we are intrinsically motivated, a place where we are inspired to learn, change, and understand by our own desire or sense of purpose -- not by our parents, teachers, friends, or the larger system’s desire for us to learn, change or understand. Yet what have we done? We’ve designed every system, most importantly the system of education, to be based on extrinsic motivation. And the rewards and punishments we mete out are daily undermining our own intrinsic motivation.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote Address: Creativity = Self-actualization. Islandwood Arts in Education Conference. August 2005. Bainbridge Island, WA
Arts as Catalyst in Community
“Steve Seidel at Harvard’s Project Zero reminds us that we can do all kinds of things on the teaching side to make an environment conducive to powerful learning, but it’s nothing unless we have the willing engagement of the learner. The arts are perfectly designed to pull the learner into an engaged state like very few disciplines, because it is all about the learner. When you are intrinsically motivated, you have the desire to exercise specific muscles or skills that will help you master the content regardless of what it is -- skills such as persistence, courage and risk taking, critical thinking, reflection and imagining possibilities.”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote Address: Arts in Community: A Powerful Catalyst. Americans for the Arts Annual Conference. 2004. Washington, DC
Bringing a Complex Idea to Fruition
“Almost 100% of school principals surveyed a few years ago believe music education encourages kids to stay in school longer. So it really begs the question, why don’t we make music and arts education an essential ingredient of every child’s education? Since the start of the decade, the decline in time for music in schools has been almost 40%. What is it we really want for our children? Maybe the better question is what do they want?”
—Lisa Fitzhugh, excerpt from Keynote Address: Bringing a Complex Idea to Fruition. Arts: The Essential Education Conference, November 2004, Johnson City, TN