Paper prepared for presentation at Cultural Diversity in Psychology: Improving Services by Addressing
Public Policy, a symposium at the American Psychological Association Convention, Washington, DC,
August, 2005.

Shelley Karliner and Lois Holzman

To begin, I want to introduce myself and Lois Holzman. I am a social worker and social
therapist with a practice here in DC, and Dr. Holzman is a developmental psychologist
and researcher of humanistic and postmodern theory and practice. Along with dozens of
our colleagues, we have worked for the past 25 years to create social therapeutics, a
psychology that supports people to utilize their creative capacities to grow and develop
throughout their lifetimes and that, simultaneously, builds community (Holzman and
Mendez, 2003). Our experience indicates that to build community human beings need to
develop, and to develop human beings need to build community.

Since the terms community and development have multiple meanings, it is important for
me to make clear the meanings they have in social therapeutics. We approach community
as a process—a collective, creative process of people bringing into existence new social
units and sharing a collective commitment to their sustainability. Thus, while community
is typically understood as an entity that is defined by membership, identity or geography,
for us community is an activity, a creative, becoming, developing activity, open to all
who want to participate.

Human development, according to mainstream psychology, is an unfolding, a series of
stages human beings go through. It supposedly stops at certain point, and it is
measurable. For us, development is an activity, a process of becoming, not something
that happens to us, but something we create. People are not just who we are, but
simultaneously who we are becoming (Newman and Holzman, 1997). Viewing and
relating to people in this way, it seems reasonable to assume, comes closer to what people
want and need than viewing and relating to them as objects to be fixed. Rather than being
defined from the outside and by others, both community and development as activity are
defined by those who create it. Their structure and activity are more improvisational than
scripted or role and rule governed.

The development community I will be speaking about today currently involves thousands
of people from all walks of life in varying levels of involvement. Its centerpiece project is
the nonprofit East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy, an
international research and training center for new approaches to human development and
community, headquartered in NYC. The Institute develops and promotes the
psychological approach known as social therapy which, in addition to being a
psychotherapy practiced by clinicians, has also been adapted and applied in the fields of
education, youth development, prevention, health care and organizational development (Holzman and Mendez, 2003). The Institute has several postgraduate training programs
and organizes seminars, onsite trainings and continuing education programs. Through
these activities and its international conferences, books and articles, the Institute
promotes a global community building practice for people from many disciplines and
traditions who share a desire to find new ways to relate to human beings and social
change. (See www.eastsideinstitute.org.)

We thank Luis Vargas for the opportunity to share this work with you today in the
context of exploring relationships between innovative practice, service delivery and
public policy. The psychology we are creating is relevant to public policy issues in the
areas of mental health, health, educational and youth development. As time is limited,
today, we decided to share with you some of the work being done with young people and
to show the ways in which this work may address and impact on educational policy.

The specific public policy issue we are addressing is that school systems around the
country are impervious to theory and practice that challenge their informational and
acquisitional learning model. In particular, studies delineating the benefits to young
people of participating in outside of school programs, especially those involving the
performing arts, are virtually ignored in policy debates and decisions. Research
conducted in the last ten years provides strong evidence that performance-based and
development-focused learning is key to success in school and in life (e.g., Arts Education
Partnership, 1999; Brice-Heath, 2000; Brice-Heath, Soep and Roach, 1998; Gordon,
Bridglall and Meroe, 2005; Jones, 2003; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development,
1992). But for most young people, urban public school youth in particular, schools do not
foster the kind of creative, risk-taking, and ensemble learning that the performing arts
require and foster. The learning model dominant in schools and underlying all but the
most radically innovative curricula and methods is an informational and acquisitional
one, not a development one. Many educators share our view that this must change.

After initial attempts in the 1980s to create a model school based in developmental
performance as opposed to acquisitional learning—which ultimately failed to grow
because parents succumbed to the pressure of test success—our development community
has pursued what has proven to be a different path (Holzman, 1997). This path is the
creating of outside-of-school programs. Conceptually, these programs are not merely
outside of school but also “other than school” in that they do not in any way replicate
school-based teaching and learning. After two decades of growing these programs as
successful laboratories for the development of a new learning model based in
developmental performance, they have begun to impact the mainstream.

The All Stars’ Programs

The programs are run by the All Stars Project, Inc., a non-profit organization that utilizes
the Institute’s social-therapeutic approach. When I lived in NY years ago, I was an active
supporter of the All Stars, as was Dr. Holzman, who is now a consultant to the
organization. The All Stars’ learning model focuses on performance, creativity and
development because of how they complement the acquisitional learning of the school day. Out of its educational and performing arts complex on 42 St, the All Stars currently
runs three outside of school youth development programs: the All Stars Talent Show
Network; the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth; and Youth OnStage!
(See www.allstars.org.)

The All Stars Talent Show Network was founded 22 years ago to provide a positive
alternative to violence for inner city youth. It involves young people between the ages of
5 and 25 from the poorest neighborhoods in NYC with opportunities to produce and
perform in talent shows in their neighborhood schools. The children and teenagers are
trained by peers with the support of adults to make every aspect of an All Stars
production happen: the auditions, in which every young rapper, singer and dancer "makes
it;" the performance workshops, in which trained theatre directors work with the young
people to create skits about issues that concern them; and the shows, where they perform
on stage and off, running the sound, stage managing, ushering and staffing security. All
Stars youth leaders also recruit and mentor younger children from their neighborhoods.
Through their involvement in building the All Stars Network, the young people learn all
sorts of technical skills, but more importantly, they create new kinds of relationships as
they learn experientially to relate to kids from other neighborhoods, to work with adults,
and to interact with their community’s institutions—schools, churches, block associations
—all the while doing something they love to do: perform.

The Development School for Youth is an eight-year old leadership-training program for
16-21 year-olds. The program is designed to introduce inner city high school students to
the world of work and support them to develop socially and culturally by performing in
new ways. The program runs weekly for three months; each session is led by executives
from major corporations—all volunteers—who conduct workshops at their workplaces,
which include financial institutions, advertising agencies and law firms, and sponsor
students in 8-week paid summer internships.

Founded in 2003, Youth Onstage! (YO!) is the newest All Stars’ youth program, offering
young people, ages 14 to 21, the opportunity to perform on stage (and work backstage) in
plays that have something to say about the world and its future. In its first year, YO!
mounted four productions including Crown Heights, which looked at the violence
between Blacks and Jews; All Stars Hip-Hop Cabaret; and Casper Hauser (A Language
Game), an experimental performance piece. In addition YO! runs a performance and
theatre-training program for young people. The program is staffed by volunteer
professional theatre artists and teachers as well as others who use performance in their
work.

Together the programs involve several thousand young people, ages 5 – 25, with
uniquely non-school like learning activities that are based in a developmental
understanding of performance—both on and off stage—as fostering emotional and social
development. Equally important, the programs emphasize the fostering of new kinds of
partnerships between youth and adults. Critical to the running of the programs are youth
volunteers who have participated in one or another of the programs, adult financial
contributors and adults who volunteer.

The All Stars’ Philosophy and Psychology of Learning
Learning is a social and cultural process. It is not located in an individual’s head, but in
what people are able to do in their environments. Effective learning takes place in
environments that 1) support some kind of development or transformation in the learners;
2) encourage them to take risks to discover and create; and 3) generate responsibility,
ownership and pride in the learners. Learning takes place in these kinds of environments
because people are creators, changers and performers. We are not merely who we are at a
given moment in our lives. We are also who we are becoming. Growth, learning, change
and transformation don’t happen to us; we create them (Holzman, 1997; 2000).

Supporting young people to learn and grow involves helping them to “practice
becoming.” Becoming involves doing what we don't know how to do, and doing what we
don't know how to do involves being “other” than who we are. Each and every one of us
did it in our infancy and early childhood—if we didn't do things we didn't know how to
do, we wouldn't have grown up. Everyone has the capacity to do things in advance of
ourselves, to go beyond ourselves, to be who and what we're not, to perform as other.
Babies who cannot speak perform as speakers. With their caretakers, they create
environments in which they play with and learn language. They and their families
perform conversations and, through this ensemble creative activity, they become
speakers.

This capacity to perform—to take "who we are" and create something
new—orients the All Stars toward reinitiating young people’s capacity to create new
performances of themselves and of their communities. In theatrical language,
participating in creating the performance “stage” and performing on it is how youth can
go beyond themselves to create new experiences, skills, intellectual capacities,
relationships, interests, emotions, hopes, goals and forms of community. The goal of the
All Stars Talent Show Network is to create stages on which young people can make their
statement and in the process experience themselves as successful and as producers of
things—and have their families and broader community share these experiences. The
activity of creating their own lives, their own stages and their own successes is of
tremendous support to young people and to their communities.

The All Stars’ Strategy

Recently, the effectiveness of these programs has begun to be acknowledged by
educators and community leaders, which is a key step in getting the issue of
developmental learning, youth development principles and performance on the
educational policy agenda. Researchers at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education
at Teachers College, Columbia University judged the programs of the All Stars to be
exemplary high performance learning communities that should serve as models for others
to emulate (Bridglall, 2005; Gordon, Bowman, and Mejia, 2003). In his recent book
America Behind the Color Line, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., wrote that the
All Stars’ programs have the “best demonstrable results – bar none” (Gates, 2004).

Another essential step in addressing policy is replicability. No matter how extraordinarily
successful a program might be, if it cannot be shown to be replicable, then it is of limited
importance—not only in policy debates but in the lives of people. And so, the All Stars
was eager to have its programs replicated. To date, the All Stars’ has expanded to
Newark NJ, and non-profit and community-based organizations in Oakland, Los Angeles,
Atlanta and Boston are developing programs with the All Stars’ model. By increasing the
number and visibility of programs for young people that complement the acquisitional
learning model of schools, the All Stars’ hopes to educate people about the effectiveness
of developmental performance learning and influence the public dialogue.

Key to expansion of these programs is how they are funded. From its beginnings, the All
Stars has been completely independent, with financial support for its programs coming
from thousands of individuals, and not governmental, university or other grants. Over
more than two decades, many thousands of people from all walks of life and income
levels have contributed to support youth and theatre programs, and many hundreds
actively volunteer their time and skills to the growth of the programs. To give you a sense
of how successful and expansionary a model the All Stars has developed, in 1989
contributions totaled $250,000 (nearly all raised on the street or at the door by volunteer
canvassers) and in 2004 over $4 million was raised (by a small staff, some volunteer
telemarketers and a large, active group of donors). This independent funding base has
given the All Stars the freedom to create developmental programs rather than
compromising on its philosophy and values to meet the mandates of a funder.

Last but not least in the All Stars’ strategy of addressing educational policy is entering
the mainstream educational system. The All Stars has been invited to negotiate a contract
with New York City for a youth program as part of a new initiative for outside-of-school
time programs. The proposed program, called The Production of Youth by Youth, plans
to involve 120 14-18 year-olds from New York City public schools in learning how
culture is produced through learning how to be producers of culture. It is an experiment
in mainstreaming the All Stars’ track record of innovation. It is also an experiment in
accepting public funding and keeping the integrity of the All Stars’ educational
philosophy.

In summary, the route we have taken to challenging an educational system that fails so
many young people has been to is to create programs that are other than school, to show
their effectiveness, and to involve thousands of people in the creation, support, expansion
and promotion—not only of the programs themselves but of the important issues their
success raises for how schooling is done in this country and how it needs to change.

References
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Brice-Heath, S. (2000). Making learning work. Afterschool Matters: Dialogues in
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Brice-Heath, S., Soep, E. and Roach, A. (1998). Living the arts through language and
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Bridglall, B.L. (2005). Varieties of supplementary education interventions. In E.W.

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