Talk to Wooster
Spring 2007
Growing Old, Staying Young, and the Creative Process
Email Story
Every
fall,Wooster’s first year students can choose from a smorgasbord
of topics for their first-year seminar. Although topics range from researching
cartoons to studying Aristotle, the seminars have a consistent objective:
to give students opportunities to think, write, and speak critically.
Here’s what happened when 15 students and 13 elders signed up for “ Creativity and Aging: Embracing our past and writing our future through intergenerational theatre practice.”
“The walls of ageism are being torn down, brick by brick, with each example of an older person accomplishing, contributing, enjoying, changing, growing, and creating new facets of life.”
From The Creative Age, by Gene D. Cohen, required text for the first-year seminar, Creativity and Aging.
Yeah, yeah. Elders are creative. If you say so.
It’s your first year at Wooster. You’ve been promised a transformative experience. But assignments are piling up. Not only do you have to read, read, read, but you’re also expected to read critically. Question. Apply your own experience. But perhaps you could opt for just partial transformation and skip the last 100 pages of the Cohen book?
Let’s replay that scene.What if you aren’t just asked to react to the required text; what if you were to also interact with elderly community members? What if you and the elders created something together? What if you were asked to evaluate a process that you actually participated in?
And that’s exactly what happened, in the first year seminar of Shirley Huston-Findley, associate professor and chair of the department of theatre and dance. Her 15 students began the class with small group presentations and discussions of theories and essays on aging. In the fifth week, they were joined by 13 community elders who had responded to an open invitation from Huston-Findley to join the class. And from this point on, a different kind of learning began to take place.
Because the first-year seminar is writing intensive, students were asked to keep journals throughout the semester, as a class requirement.
