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Wartburg residents and Sarah Lawrence students at the course exhibition for the Fall 2021 course "Objects and Retentiveness." Image courtesy of Emily C. Bloom.

This post is the first in a series of blogs by Fellows at Sarah Lawrence College, who are part of SLC's Mellon Foundation-funded initiative Liberal Arts and the Public Good. In this post, public humanities fellow Dr. Emily C. Bloom shares her work at Sarah Lawrence and Wartburg Adult Care Community. You can read more almost the Liberal Arts and the Public Proficient initiative here, and bank check out the posts from the other Fellows, Dr. Kishauna Soljour and Dr. Yeong Ran Kim.

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My grandmother was a consummate reader. Every time I visited her at her nursing habitation in Long Island, she had a volume in her lap. She was known by the staff as "the lady who reads." As her dementia advanced, her experience as a reader changed. Towards the cease, I'm not sure how much of the reading was just an ingrained habit—optics that moved from left to right in a rhythmic fashion. Just whatever it did for her, she stayed a reader until the very end.

I thought well-nigh my grandmother when I began a new position in fall 2021 equally Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College and the Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mountain Vernon, New York. In this three-year Mellon-funded fellowship, I serve as both faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and on the staff at Wartburg, splitting my time between both institutions. The expectation is that I will develop community-engaged courses for Sarah Lawrence undergraduates and lifelong learning opportunities for seniors at Wartburg. This work sits at the intersection between medical humanities and community appointment educational activity, providing opportunities for students to study elder care and its challenges while besides learning alongside Wartburg residents and giving both groups an opportunity to learn from each other.

Elderberry care is one of the pressing challenges of our time; as life expectancy increases, the elderly (those over the age of 85) are the fastest growing sector of our population and the proportion of the elderly in relation to the rest of the population is growing substantially.¹ This "age moving ridge" is a feminist upshot—the bulk of the elderly population are women, many of whom spent their lives caring for others without pay. It is also a social justice upshot; as Silvia Federici argues, the "globalization" of care work in the 1980s and 1990s has "shifted a large amount of care-work on the shoulders of immigrant women" who are ofttimes underpaid and whose ain care needs go unfulfilled.ⁱⁱ The question that I enquire myself is, where do the humanities fit into this discussion? Tin can studying literature assistance students understand the challenges of elder care; can discussing a poem raise the lives of our elders?

When I sat down to design courses that served these needs, I thought back to my experiences with my grandmother and I plant myself oftentimes returning to poetry every bit a vehicle for this learning. At that place are barriers with poesy, for sure. Many people do not think of themselves equally poetry readers. Even at 80 and xc years old, I find many of the residents at Wartburg are still scarred from high school and college teachers who intimidated them or made them feel like they couldn't sympathise poetry. But against these barriers, nothing beats the length of a sonnet for reading and discussing together or the audio of a specially audible poem for sharing as an impromptu performance.

Wartburg serves a range of seniors from those living independently on the premises to those with dementia and Alzheimer's who need around-the-clock care. I've adult dissimilar formats for these dissimilar groups. For seniors in contained living, I run a traditional college seminar where undergraduates and residents do the reading in accelerate and we spend the semester discussing literature together. In the autumn, the course topic was "Objects and Memory" and we discussed the role of objects in preserving, stirring, or obfuscating our memories. We talked nigh Marcel Proust's madeleine in Remembrance of Things By and Samuel Beckett'due south tape in Krapp's Last Tape. The students traded stories most lost records (or video game consoles) and inherited mainland china (or jeans). For their concluding project, the undergraduates interviewed the seniors about an object of significance to them and produced the recording in the course of an oral history podcast. For those in assisted living and the nursing home, instead of a traditional seminar, I've been holding workshops where the participants may modify from solar day to mean solar day, merely I show up every other week with an activity or a parcel of poems that nosotros read together.

"I approach the poem as a room, just every bit the Italian word 'stanza' suggests; the poem creates a space or a room where we can all encounter."

Teaching at Wartburg has inverse my approach to teaching literature; I'm no longer concerned with whether students understand formal structures or larn poetic terminology. I approach the poem equally a room, just every bit the Italian word "stanza" suggests; the poem creates a space or a room where we can all run into. The actual rooms that nosotros run into in are at Wartburg. The COVID situation has made this more challenging, but too—in some means—more rewarding. After over a year in lockdown at Wartburg with no visitors or volunteers on site, lifelong learning programs had ground to a halt. Seniors and staff were extremely vocal with me almost wanting us to run across in person, not online. To ensure everyone'south safety, nosotros required that students taking my classes be vaccinated and boosted and provide proof of seasonal influenza shots and TB tests. When nosotros go to Wartburg, the undergraduates take a van and I'm often the driver. Meeting at Wartburg is applied, peculiarly for seniors with mobility impairments, only it'south more than that. I've establish that my undergraduate students are sometimes very nervous their first time going into an assisted living facility or nursing habitation. Some of them take experience with grandparents in similar spaces, simply many practise not. One student told me explicitly that she is agape of erstwhile people. As the semester progressed, I saw tentative students grow more comfy, leaning closer to understand seniors with speech difficulties and asking questions that showed 18-carat curiosity and care. At our concluding gathering, an impromptu dance party bankrupt out with students and seniors bopping along to Millie Smalls' "My Boy Lollipop."

Equally my get-go year at Wartburg ends, I find myself more and more committed to teaching literature in this kind of multi-generational setting. As Michael Blackie and Erin Lamb write in the Periodical of Medical Humanities, "texts matter, and what we practise with texts in our classrooms matters."³ I would improve this argument to say that what we exercise with these texts outside of the classroom matters even more.

Last week our poetry workshop met in the assisted living facility at Wartburg to read Elizabeth Bishop'south "The Fine art of Losing." One of the residents was struck by Bishop's description of losing keys—she told us how much she hates the feeling of losing her keys. Some other was irritated by Bishop'due south assertion that "the fine art of losing isn't hard to chief." She disliked the smug presumption of the phrase. Nosotros broke into small groups and I partnered with a staff member who participated in our grouping—a young man who lived nearby in the Bronx. We'd been meeting every other week for six months and he hardly missed a workshop. He told me that while he was reading the poem, he thought virtually a friend that he had a falling out with. He wasn't sure if this was what he was supposed to exist thinking about. At the end, he said, "it's almost like anybody looks at the poem differently. Like it'southward about what we bring to it." In this moment, he articulated exactly what I was coming to learn about public humanities pedagogy. It is about engaging different experiences in order to heighten our understanding of texts but, more than importantly, our understanding of each other. The public humanities can help bring people to the aforementioned room—the same stanza—but information technology'south those experiences that we bring with us into the room that fill the space with meaning.

Emily C. Bloom is Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence Higher and the Wartburg Adult Care Community. She is the author of The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the First Book Prize past the Modernist Studies Association. Her writing on 20th- and 21st-century British and Irish gaelic literature, the history of science and technology, and disability studies has appeared in Public Books, The Irish Times, International Yeats Studies, and Éire-Republic of ireland, among others. Her current book, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art, is nether contract with St. Martin's Press.

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Source: https://humanitiesforall.org/blog/object-lessons-conversations-across-generations

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