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Dionne Custer-Edwards, Educator for School Programs
May 05, 2016
Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer, artist-educator, and our educator for school programs. She runs the Wexner Center’s program WorldView, Expanded Classroom, and Pages, now in its tenth year. Dionne reflects on the beginning of the arts and literacy program, its impact, and shares memorable thoughts from past participating teachers.
Pages began with a small pilot of 60 students and two teachers in 2005 and ten years later, Pages has worked with over 2000 students, over 25 teachers, and dozens of teaching artists. The program is more than an opportunity to engage writing in new and dynamic ways—it is a seasoned and thoughtful practice with proven strategies and methodology. The work of this program embodies sophisticated learning experiences far beyond the writing prompt, accompanied by myriad creative happenings, and the rich layered complex multidisciplinary work of contemporary artists.
Rather than focus solely on a specific writing skill or task, Pages leverages what is already cultivated in the traditional classroom setting, pairing that learning with arts experiences that ask students, teachers, and teaching artists to discover, think, reflect, write, create, and learn, together. This collaborative creative space of teaching and learning, coupled with engaged students of varying ability, demographic, and grade level, woven with the wise creative vision, wonder, skill, and reach of the teaching artists, makes for a brilliant blend of exquisite, messy, interesting, risky, dynamic learning in and around the arts and the high school curriculum.
Thank you to all of our supporters, partners, and participants. As we mark 10 years of Pages, reflect on how this program has contributed to the arts in education, we know we are just getting started and that there is still more work to do. Stay tuned, follow the work; join us as we continue.
Join us for the tenth Pages open mic reading and reception on Tuesday, May 10 at the Columbus Metropolitan Whitehall Branch.
Photo by Jay LaPrete
Pages is a way for my students to learn how to explore themselves and the world: how to feel, how to write. Pages was the first opportunity many of my students had to explore the arts and make it meaningful to them. It is their window to a different world! Well, a window implies a barrier. It is an open door! –Laura Garber, 2013-15, Franklin Heights High School
Photo by Katie Spengler
Pages is a program where my students get to explore. Not only explore a physical place—the Wexner Center—and what happens there on the walls, on the screen and on stage, but also a place where they can explore the intersection of art and ideas. It is a place students can explore behind the curtain of contemporary art and learn that it is not some strange, unknowable land, but one that they can navigate through engagement, questioning and journaling. –Kim Leddy, 2011-15, Mosaic
I love when the history and literature that we teach are alive for students because their issues are so relevant to issues that we are facing today. Pages brings these issues to the students and forces them to experience some of what the world-at-large is wrestling with. In other words, Pages matters. –Gary Liebesman, 2011-15, Columbus Alternative High School
Pages opens eyes and minds that might not have even realized they were closed. –Mandy Bruney, 2012-14, Pickerington High School North
Pages is a dynamic way to get my students to see that learning doesn't happen in a vacuum and we learn best when given the chance to make connections between the disciplines.—Stephanie Cohen, 2010-11, The Arts & College Preparatory Academy
Pages is a risk; students surround themselves in a bubble of comfort, and Pages bursts that bubble. Students must deal with complex, adult, modern, and problematic concepts that they are not used to seeing in school. Pages asks students to challenge themselves to look beyond the classroom walls to the adult world with which they are soon to enter.—Maureen Gorsuch, 2011-12, Reynoldsburg High School
The Pages program offers a rare and incredible opportunity for my students to venture quite literally out of their neighborhoods and their safe zones physically and intellectually. Many of my students have never been to the Ohio State University campus, much less to an art museum. So this experience opens not only the world of art and human expression on a level impossible to attain in the four walls of the a classroom, it opens the University and the city of Columbus, showing them the rich treasures which lie just beyond the borders of their daily routines. –Antonia Mulvihill, 2006-08, Beechcroft High School
By allowing our students the freedom to use their journals as they wish they were able to improve their understandings through their own writing. Students became more vocal during class discussions, unafraid to share their thoughts and opinions. Pages was so engaging, the opportunities for learning were endless. –Enddy Messick, 2007-09, Walnut Ridge High School
I was able to see the challenges in students that were hesitant or disagreeable or just plain disengaged and I liked how the teaching artists didn’t ever really let students off the hook. As a teacher, that’s been a challenge for me, and I really like the dedication and commitment from each of the presenters who worked with our students. Pages reminds us that writing is important and should not be left out for any reason. –Craig Saarie, 2008-09, Metro School
[After participating in Pages] my students were more confident as writers; their creativity was encouraged and more open to different perspectives about the world. Pages is the overleaf that defines the promise of what school should be. –Rikki Santer, 2010-12, Upper Arlington High School
