Stitching together an intergenerational learning experience.
As a member of the Goucher College faculty, Michael Curry was certainly aware of Edenwald, though it came to the forefront of his attention when his mother was considering relocating from Cleveland and they visited the Towson, MD senior living community together. “We both really liked it and were fascinated by it,” Michael says. “I just felt like there was an interesting kind of connection between Edenwald and the college.”
That connection is becoming increasingly celebrated today as, through our partnership with Goucher College, Edenwald is evolving to become a college-enriched senior living community. In the months and years ahead, both institutions will be developing additional avenues for intergenerational programming, but for Michael Curry, it’s been in full swing for some time.
Michael, who began as a theater professor at Goucher College in 1986 (coincidentally, the year the college first started admitting men), taught a course called Theater in the Community. According to Michael, the course explored ways of using theater to enhance the community, promote conflict resolution, and more.
Sometime around 2000, one of Michael’s Theater in the Community students decided she was going to start an intergenerational theater program. “So, she basically went over to Edenwald,” he explains, “and recruited some residents to be in a production of ‘Our Town.’”
On the heels of what Michael considered a successful experiment, his next Theater in the Community class returned to Edenwald. “We did a series of improvisational days and storytelling,” he says. “Residents would tell their stories and then the students would act them out. It was a great exchange. Everyone had fun, and it confirmed what I had believed for a long time, that Edenwald was a great partner for us.”
Then, after 30 years of teaching theater, a new opportunity came Michael’s way. Goucher College was creating a new major, Integrative Arts Studies. Michael explains the new discipline, “Integrative Arts looks at arts education a little bit differently,” he says. “Instead of looking at the techniques for being a painter or a sculptor or an actor or a ballet dancer, we look first at what are the common connections between artists in terms of how they work and how their creative process works . Once the students have a solid understanding of that, they apply it to their respective minors—painting, sculpture, ballet, etc.—to get to the hands-on technique aspect of the work.”
As part of the Integrated Arts Studies program, Michael decided to create an Arts in the Community class. “It’s a little bit broader than Theater in the Community,” Michael says, “but it has the same principles: How does art bring people together? What benefits do communities get from having exposure to art? What happens when artists work with members of the community and vice versa? What do they create together?”
Once again, Michael turned to Edenwald. In the fall semester of 2023, students in his Art in the Community class began interviewing several Edenwald residents, especially those close to 100 years old, and those who had emigrated to the Unites States from other countries. “The students focused on their stories,” Michael says, “and then made art projects that would honor them. At the end of the semester, we had a big gathering with the residents who had shared their stories and the artworks the students had created. It was a very moving event. The students spoke about the process behind the creation of their artworks, then they gave them to the residents as a way to honor them and to thank them for sharing that part of their lives with us.”
Michael says the students had a great experience working with the Edenwald residents. “They were kind of blown away by some of the residents’ stories, all of which were pretty remarkable, and it stimulated some very interesting art projects.”
The common bond of women’s rights.
Two years following that experience, Michael would teach another fall semester class of Art in the Community, and once again, he would reach out to Edenwald residents for inspiration. During the course of the earlier class, he had met Joan McMahon, an Edenwald resident who, among many other pursuits, is involved with the community’s quilting club.
One of Joan’s friends reminded her that Women’s History Month would be coming up in April, and perhaps the Art in the Community class could do something related to women’s rights.
“I immediately took to the idea,” Michael says. “It’s an important topic, and not just women’s rights, but rights in general are really important to be talking about right now. By extension, whenever you talk about women’s rights, you’re also talking about men’s rights and family rights and gender rights. All of these things resonate with our students. They’re at a time in their lives when they’re formulating identities, and thinking about their future and what it’s going to be like for them out in the real world.”
Michael points out that Goucher College has a strong connection with women’s rights movements, especially the suffrage movement. The college was founded in 1885, but it would be another 35 years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and women gained the right to vote. “We have a lot of documentation, especially photographs, of how Goucher College students were involved in the suffrage movement,” he says.
Additionally, Michael notes that a number of Edenwald residents lived through many social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the early women’s rights movements, feminism, feminist awareness, and feminist activism. “Between the two campuses,” he says, “we have an enormous wealth of experience to talk about, look at, and share.”
Coming together over a quilt.
For Michael’s 2025 Art in the Community class, which is currently underway as of press time, the deliverable will not be a group of individual art works, but rather a single work of art that all 15 students and a team of Edenwald residents will work on collectively: a quilt.
The Story Quilt will consist of panels depicting the struggle for women’s rights—informed by both Goucher College history and Edenwald residents’ experience—and expressed artistically by the students.
Michael says the students are excited about the project. “I think they’re feeling really good,” he says. “They’re getting their heads around how the arts can contribute to community and are beginning to reflect on their own practices as young artists and how what they do can benefit other people.”
Michael intends to talk to the class about the AIDS Quilt and how, in the mid-1980s, thousands of people came together to create and display a quilt larger than a football field to honor their friends and family members who had died from the disease. “I’m going to present it as an example of how people can come together around an idea, around a phenomenon in the world, and use quilting as a way of expressing it—as a way of working through grief,” he says.
When it comes time to create the Story Quilt itself, both the students and the Edenwald residents will be hands-on. Michael sees great potential for enhanced benefits as a result of the process. “It’s historically observable,” he says, “quilting brings people together. They sit around, they sew together, they talk about their families, they talk about their aspirations, they talk about their lived experiences.
“What we’ve been seeing from Edenwald residents” he continues, “is that as much as they want to tell their stories, they’re also really curious about the students’ lives and what it’s like to be a young person in this day and age. What are the challenges? What are these students looking forward to or what are they afraid of? I think there are going to be some really interesting conversations that are separate from the quilt itself.”
While the Story Quilt will be, as Michael says, “the big reveal,” the students will also have to do a reflection at the end of the semester about what it was like to work on the project. “What did they learn from the process? What were the most important moments for them? What was it like to work as a community?” Michael’s plan is to then share those insights with the Edenwald residents who were involved with the project.
When all is said and done, Michael believes all parties will be better off for having participated in the Story Quilt. “I think that any kind of interaction that we could do on an academic level, on a social level, on a shared history level is really important, and can only help to promote mutual understanding and respect.”
If you’d like to learn more about other ways the Edenwald/Goucher College partnership is shaping Maryland’s premier college-enriched senior living community, as well as Edenwald’s INSPIRE expansion, call an Edenwald Residency Counselor at 410-339-6263.
