Service learning and storytelling are two of Barbara Bogue's passions, and the culminating semester project incorporating both will be presented from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Cornerstone Center for the Arts.
Bogue teaches "Creative Writing in the Community," part of the English department's creative writing major and the title of a service learning course she has been adapting for the past eight years.
"I've always believed that we're all natural storytellers," she said. "It's critical to give voice to those who aren't often heard."
Beginning in Spring 2001b her English class, "Introduction to Creative Writing: Prose," began an experimental approach to storytelling. The students in the class were to spend a minimum of five hours at one of two assisted living locations to share stories with an assigned resident.
She originally found two places willing to work with her students in 2001 — Heritage Retirement Village and Hillcroft Residence Center — but now Motivate Our Minds and Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Delaware County also participate as community partners for the course.
The characters immortalized into the students' compositions are bound and unveiled in a published volume, "Out of the Margins," at tonight's reception. Sign-up sheets will be posted for copies of the book, which contains the entire original works and will be released next week at a private reception.
Each location involved with the project exists as its own entity, and each student experience is different, so no two stories are ever the same, Bogue said. All of the residents are mentally alert and articulate, she said, allowing for the students and community members to build relationships.
"The point is they know someone is there to visit with them and that someone cares about them and wants to hear what they have to say," she said.
Speech impairment and verbally understanding their partners are the primary obstacles for students writing about clients at Hillcroft, Bogue said. House managers are there to interpret, but after a few visits, the students begin to understand and bond, she said.
Eric Spatt visits Hillcroft weekly. Through his visits, Spatt learned that his partner, Robert Lee, loves strumming along to gospel music, wrapping hoses at the community center and that he worked at a Pizza Hut until he had heart surgery a few years ago.
But what Spatt will remember most about Lee is his ear-to-ear smile — and the fact that he doesn't like being called Rob, a name by which Spatt refers to him anyway, he said.
The final poem Spatt wrote for the course, "Can I Call You Rob?" describes the basis of their relationship that developed throughout the semester, Spatt said.
"...So if I call you Rob and not Robert," he writes. "It's because I respect a man whose hands are marked by the pride of his job."
Enrollment in the course has taught Spatt about the values of storytelling and has given him something that will last with him long after the course is over — a friendship with Lee.
"We've become buddies, hanging out in his room, playing guitar every week," he said. "It's been fun to get to know him and it's an honor to get to write about him."
As with student pairs at the other organizations, similar themes develop each year that encompass the overall importance of bonding in the human experience. Everyone has a story to tell and sometimes there are connections to which we all can relate.
"Often those stories aren't put out there for people to read. ... People are living in totally different circumstances than my students. For example, a 22 year old working with a person who's 94, but yet they find connections," Bogue said. "They're more alike to their partners than they are different, and that's good."
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