ANN ARBOR—Instead of sitting in a lecture, Joyce Meier’s students do their “learning” by spending time with children and senior citizens, listening to their life stories.

Meier, a University of Michigan English lecturer, designs a number of her classes around volunteering because “often we forget how full our own lives are, much less the lives of others around us, and helping someone else to remember their life can inspire students to think about their own lives.”

According to Meier, life-sorting, story-telling, and exchanging our stories make all of us richer.

Two of her courses developed as a result of a special partnership between U-M’s Arts of Citizenship program, which supports creative teaching and research projects in local communities, and the current two-year residency of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a national dance troupe which combines movement and life-story in community settings.

Directed by members of both organizations, Meier and other U-M faculty met and even danced with a group of representatives from various Detroit community organizations.

“In these meetings, which took place over the past year, we attempted to explore partnerships and to discuss needs and opportunities of each community, as well as to feel the differences in the varying communities we lived in,” says Meier. After that, “the planning and projects just evolved.”

Eventually, Meier’s students traveled to Detroit’s Winan’s Academy, an elementary school, and to CAMP Detroit, an after-school program for Detroit children. Elders from the Hannan House in Detroit also participated in the project, when they came to visit CAMP Detroit.

The U-M students spent time with the children and seniors, facilitating and participating in a number of life-writing activities.

“The changes in my students have been remarkable,” says Meier. “Some developed a sense of openness and wonder about the elders and children they met and grew to love.” Other students changed in that they learned new ways to work with young people, “learning to cross boundaries, and to listen better. Some learned to let go of their stereotypes of ‘Detroit.’

“For me, there was also the joy of sharing in THEIR joy: of the U-M students who so delighted in the changes they observed in the young people they worked with, such as the change in the child who initially said he hated writing to one who asked eagerly: ‘But will we get to write today?’

“The U-M students wrote periodic journal responses about their experiences, so I was able to see and respond to their reflections. This writing culminated in their final own written life-stories, which were also incredibly rich.”

For next year, Meier received an award from the Arts of Citizenship grant program, which is intended to foster research, teaching, and creative projects that explore culture in publicly accessible ways, or that encourage innovative teaching and research in collaboration with community partners.

The grant money will be used “to help us publicize our exchange so that we can tell our own story of this project to others, and we can ‘grow’ more writing projects like this,” Meier says. In a more immediate way, the money will also help with practical matters, “like the transportation of the elders to the sites where the children are, and to help get the children to our campus, for a field trip such as the one we sponsored this past spring. There are numerous practical problems yet to solve: how to get 50 Winan’s children to campus for a field trip, how to bring the elders to the children, how to get the university students to Detroit on a weekly basis.”

This past semester Meier received support from a variety of places—such as the U-M’s Arts of Citizenship Program and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. “The grant money will be extraordinarily helpful in smoothing the way for all the parties involved—to enable U-M students and the community elders and children to come together.”

For more information contact Joyce Meier at (734) 647-7702 or meierjzz@umich.edu.

EnglishArts of Citizenship programDetroit’s Winan’s Academymeierjzz@umich.edu