Beyond the Page

Twice in my life, I taught college-level courses for a period of three years—but those two periods were completely different. My first time in the front of the classroom, I was coming from a background in acting, administration, libraries, and student service, but my model for college-level teaching was lecture-and-listen. Not the most engaging.

I stepped out of teaching for three years, then returned as I completed my final graduate degree. Every day, we were creating, moving, and imagining together. English 101 became a place to build scrapbooks, share playlists, and imaginatively write based on what we found on a short “nature walk” around the building of our urban campus in Denver, Colorado. Creative Writing became storytelling, songwriting, collages between visual and written media, embodying poems that never lived on the static written pages.

What changed? Well, just a few months after that first teaching period ended, I found NAI and what teaching and learning and connecting and creating could be.

NAI was the first professional conference where I found myself amid a New Orleans parade, singing and dancing down the city streets. Where presenters did not simply read scripts but embodied their subjects, often through music and visuals and audience participation. Where I had the feeling of being “on a field trip” in every session. This is what learning could be. Dynamic, embodied, participatory, personally relevant.

I love the written page. I’m a writer and editor! But I love when the page breaks open and we connect in ways we never could have ever expected. Language often only goes so far.

I love how creative arts encourage us to break away from one-way flows of connection and meaning. On that note, I will close with the final paragraphs of NAI President Parker McMullen Bushman’s article, which itself closes this exciting issue—or, let’s say, opens it again into a loop: