Pages: 15 Years of Art and Writing

DIONNE CUSTER EDWARDS, DIRECTOR OF LEARNING & PUBLIC PRACTICE

Creating Pages 15 years ago was an opportunity for me to take what I had learned in the field as a teaching artist in community-based contexts and cultural institutions and develop a framework informed by those experiences. Pages works in service of K–12 education, and in conceptualizing this program, the aim was to create more depth. The intention was to no longer walk in and out of those classrooms and not be accountable for, tethered to, and inspired by what happened there. Pages was designed to create a space that allowed more time to work with artists, educators, and students in schools— an environment where the arts and academics could intersect, blend, and shape new dimensions for teaching and learning. Pages offers high school students the ability to engage with the arts and the practice of creative writing, both at the Wex and inside of their school curricula and settings. The interaction between these realms is a crucial one, as Stacey O’Reilly, Pages educator in residence at Big Walnut High School, observes:

“Required creative writing provides students the time and a place to get to better know themselves, which also allows them to discover what they believe and what is worth fighting for.…Creative writing and essay writing are not mutually exclusive. One can and does support the other. Just as we search for supplemental readings in support of the novels we study in class, the Pages program helped me as a teacher to find supplemental writings in support of student learning.” Committed to supporting the expansion of the arts in education, Pages is a multivisit, multiple-points-of-contact program, an intervention transforming how we think about and practice writing through ongoing, unexpected encounters. In addition to attending an exhibition, film, and performance at the Wex, during each program year students meet writers and artists—people who make things, who think about the world and translate that thinking into art. Pages is curious about whether arts learning in and out of conventional settings might allow for educators and students to teach, think, learn, and write differently—echoing the processes and curiosities of artists. Pages pushes toward a more flexible learning environment that offers educators and students more options. It is a yearlong journey, an ever-changing and layered community of ideas, participants, and activities—a partnership that includes schools, educators, students, artists, and the Wex. That sustained commitment to partnership is the fundamental structure, function, and reason behind the program’s success.

Cassie Coggburn, Pages educator in residence at Westerville South High School, recently spoke about “how literature is a window or a mirror into a subject or matter.” She spoke earlier this year at our Pages artist and educator retreat about making room for students to encounter stories and art “as an opening or as a reflection.” This looking inside builds the kinds of skills students develop during a year of Pages, where the matters and contexts of making collide with the curriculum and allow students to consider how what they are learning about is situated more widely in society, with implications beyond the classroom. Scholar and arts educator Elliot Eisner wrote that “in education, the really important effects of teaching are located outside the school.”¹ And indeed, Pages strives to explore that notion of learning both within and beyond the margins, offering a fluid conceptual space for instruction, discovery, creativity, and connection to the world.² As Enddy Stevens, Pages educator in residence at Walnut Ridge High School, wrote:

“As teachers we are constantly searching for ways to challenge and motivate our students. Watching young people grow, learn, and master content are just a few of the small joys, but the most valuable gift we can give our students is the opportunity to explore and make connections to the outside world…When students are taken out of a traditional classroom setting and given the opportunity to experience art, appreciate language, and learn to find their voices, great things will follow. Through Pages, my students have blossomed into independent learners and understand the power of words and how they can shape their worldview.” As Pages navigates 2020–21 with our seven partner high schools— Big Walnut, Briggs, Franklin Heights, Walnut Ridge, West-Liberty Salem, Westerville South, and Whitehall-Yearling—the public health pandemic and myriad social crises have posed new challenges. Teaching in crisis is a whole other body of work. K–12 schools are already vulnerable, a delicate pool of dynamics. Now, today’s acute conditions add a layer of intricacy to an already complex system. Museum and school education requires persistence, patience, partnership—and our current Pages educators in residence have shown an unspeakable amount of resolve, flexibility, and commitment. They expressed a healthy amount of caution, yet a visible sense of relief, when we all decided as a group that we would proceed with Pages this year despite all of the uncertainty and obstacles due to the pandemic. Proceeding meant increasing our communication and planning ahead, but also keeping our ideas and schedules nimble while experimenting with new modes of program delivery. The work requires strategy, and when that doesn’t work out as planned, revision—mirroring the writing process itself, or any critical or creative process. In Pages, we collaborate, coteach, and cowrite an arts-integrated curriculum where all of our ideas and methodologies are interwoven throughout the year. We are all practitioners: artists, educators, administrators, teachers, and learners. In Pages, arts partnership is an active process and living concept that requires collaboration, curiosity, and experimentation; an ongoing sharing of insight; and the cultivation of deep relationships. In this time of crisis, these relationships are what sustain us and this work.

1. Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 50. 2. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Group, 1934).

Learn more about the Pages program and read the yearly publication created by participating students at pagesprogram.com.

THIS SPREAD Pages students in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Theater (opposite page) and galleries (above), photos: Katie Gentry.