School re-imagined
"The school also actively, if subtly, cultivates emotional skills. Lotte’s symbolic movement session had an emotional foundation: “Both emotionally and cognitively, do you dare to be positively maladjusted right now, in this session, with your peers? Because of course they were looking at each other like ‘What are we doing? Are we really going to move like she’s asking us?’” Lotte sensed shame in some of her students—freeze responses, to use the language of the nervous system—“so I tried to invite them to celebrate diversity and to mirror themselves instead of comparing themselves to the others.
Adults demonstrating these emotional skills is part of the plan, too. Lotte said her artistic motion session “was also an invitation to myself to be positively maladjusted with respect to who I am as a lecturer. If I even call myself a lecturer, you know, that sounds good from a social perspective, but here I am interacting with adolescents, and they invite me to become an adolescent and step into their world—look at the world from their perspective—and I think that what they see is much more magical than what adults see in the world, often.”