The following is a post written by a student in Memory, Aging & Expressive Arts, our new interdisciplinary course. This semester students are collaborating with Wisdom Keepers club members, one of the U-M Geriatric Centers Mild Memory Loss Programs.             Take a look!

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Every Wednesday, I work with a wonderful community member that loves sharing her passion for storytelling and helping the community.  She has tremendous ambition and goals regarding things she would like to do to help people in her community.  Specifically, she is interested in helping patients at Mott Children’s hospital.  She has thought of all sorts of ideas from making blankets or bed pads, to seeking out U of M athletes to visit the children and pass out signed photographs.  Her passion for the community seems to stem from her desire to connect with others.  She connects with people by using one of her greatest strengths—her voice!  This community member is extremely articulate and vocal.  More often than not, she is found walking around Wisdom Keepers or sitting at our table storytelling and talking.

As we create things, she continues to tell stories of family, friends, recent events, and new projects she has been thinking about.   This community member’s stories always have one thing in common—laughter!   One day, she shared a story with me about spotting an injured deer on the side of the road.  She saw a truck drive up and a person jump out to pick up the deer and put it in their truck bed.  She was so moved by this.  She thought, “How sweet! That person is taking that poor deer to the vet!”  Later, she told a friend the story of the wonderfully kind people that helped the deer.  The friend replied, “Honey, they were not helping that deer—they were going to eat it!”  The community member and I had quite a laugh about that!

As I have gotten to know my community member, I have realized how important it is to observe and become aware of your specific member’s expectations of this process.  I have addressed this by listening and understanding her project ideas and adapting them to fit our skill set and time constraint.  Further, as we have become more comfortable around one another, I’ve learned how to give her what she needs.  For example, I can sense when she needs someone to listen and engage with her or when she needs a bit more direction from me.  This experience continues to be a hilariously fun time and an opportunity for personal growth!  I am excited to continue working and getting to know my community member.

 -Sarah 

Funded by the University of Michigan Transforming Learning for Third Century (TLTC) Quick Wins grant program, this semester we are offering a new course that brings together students and professors from across campus.

Uniquely engaging U-M academic institutions and the U-M Health System, Memory, Aging & Expressive Arts builds an understanding and awareness of the complexities of memory loss and introduces the use of the expressive arts. For the past month, students have met with specialists in neurology, public health, social work, and the arts to learn about the scientific basis of memory and dementia, the societal basis of dementia, and institutional projects to support individuals with memory impairment.  Students have also been exploring their own creativity through painting, storytelling, and drumming.

Partnering with University of Michigan Geriatric Centers Mild Memory Loss Programs, students have been paired with a Wisdom Keeper club member to explore the potential of the arts to serve as an outlet for expression and to learn from shared experiences.   In the coming weeks, students will be collaborating with the Wisdom Keeper members on a variety of creative experiences.  Please stay tuned as students will be sharing their insights and lessons learned in future posts.

Anne Mondro, Associate Professor, University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design

Earlier this month, Elaine Reed and I had an opportunity to present at the 2013 Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center’s (MADC) Appreciation Luncheon “Preserving Wellness through Research and Creativity.”  As part of our presentation on our creative interventions, we created this short video highlighting the amazing artwork created by members from the Silver Club and Elderberry Club, which are part of the University of Michigan Geriatric Center’s Mild Memory Loss Programs.  In collaboration with U-M Stamps School of Art & Design Students, club members created these fantastic works of art!

The artwork is currently on display in the South Lobby Gallery on the first floor of the University of Michigan Hospital, located at 1500 East Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

For more information on the exhibition please visit http://www.med.umich.edu/goa

~ Anne Mondro, Associate Professor, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

Retaining Identity:  An exhibition of artwork

Retaining Identity captures the spirit of creativity and embraces a shared experience.  Partnering with UM Geriatric Center- Silver Club Memory Loss Program club members, including the newer Elderberry (barely elder) group, UM Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design students guided members in art making.  Professor Anne Mondro’s students and club members shared experiences and expertise to create one-of-a kind works of art.

May 11- June 23, 2013, Opening Reception May 28th from 2:30-4:00pm

UM Matthaei Botanical gardens and Nichols arboretum, 1800 N. Dixboro Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, mbgna.umich.edu (734) 647-7600

The theme of the semester was Lessons Learned.  Every time I teach this course, I too learn a bit more.  I must admit it is a challenge to teach a community engagement course.   I am often worried if I am meeting the students’ expectations as well as my community partners.  I wake up wondering if the bus will be on time and if I have the right materials and supplies.  More importantly, I wonder about the students.  I hope they are connecting with their community partner, hope they are understanding why I selected the readings I did, hope they are enjoying the experience and learning from it.  Likewise, I hope the UM Silver Club & Elderberry members are enjoying the experience.  Every semester I go through the same set of worries.  Now that the semester is over, I realize I should start giving up some of the worries. Observing my students interacting with the community members, I noticed how thoughtful, respectful, and patient they are.  They reminded me of what this class is truly about.

~Anne Mondro, Associate Professor UM Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

A few of more artworks created by Silver Club members during the course of the semester:

My experience at Silver Club was enlightening, to say the least. I feel as if I have been re-taught about aging and illness in a way that one can only learn by experience. I realized that up until volunteering there, I avoided the topic of aging in my head most of the time. Our culture has such an age bias that anyone over the age of forty is seen as irrelevant to modernity, progress, and fulfillment. I want to tell so many people that they are wrong. I want to go on television in a news broadcast and announce to the world that the elderly deserve their place in the media; in conversation. I realized that although I might know more about an iPhone than an 82-year-old, that person knows ten times more about life than me. I could have talked to my Silver Club partner for hours; he always had an interesting story to tell. I heard about his college days, his wife who used to always correct his grammar, traveling abroad, playing in a band, and all sorts of other things.

I also learned about treating human beings like, well, human beings. You can’t assume that because someone has dementia, that they need to be bossed around and worried over like a child. Not only do they deserve more respect, but if you show someone with dementia your true attention and give it a little time, you will see that there is still a strong personality and will in the mind of that person, a mind full of experiences that just need a little prompting to un-tap.

~ Sarah,  UM School of Art & Design Student 

My member and I get along very well. Often times he would be in the process of teasing someone or creating a dramatic situation when I arrived, and then expect me to be his sidekick in antagonizing other members about their age. It seems a bit terrible (and in a way it was), but a lot of the times it was simply funny, something I couldn’t acknowledge with laughter out of respect for others but that I would chuckle about when I got home. I realized after maybe the second time there, that I was pretty wrong about the conversations I expected to happen vs. the conversations I didn’t expect. We could talk about anything. We talked about bullies, swimming lessons, dating, etc…and everyone at my table had a great dynamic. I can’t even count the number of times we ended up shaking in laughter.

I guess the reason I wanted to write about laughing is because when I first thought about what volunteering would be like, I assumed (as I’m sure others do) that it would be a very solemn, heavy business. However sad Alzheimer’s may be as a condition, these wonderful people get through it with laughter and a lightness that I only hope to emulate in the face of personal tragedy. They do not treat it as a tragedy at all, (at least in my experience) but a dry comedy for the ages.

~ Sarah, Art & Design student 

I was apprehensive at first about working with Silverclub and Elderberry. The staff member had made several remarks about how excited everyone was to be working with right-brained creative types, which I don’t consider myself at all. I’m a designer, a problem solver, and when I can’t approach things in a calculated, analytical matter, I’m frozen. And now I wouldn’t just be frozen in my inability to get my own work done, but I would have someone counting on me to navigate the scary world of “fine arts,” and I’d let them down too!

My Elderberry Club partner frequently mentioned that she was “no artist” but this turned out not to be an impediment to our collaboration, but a blessing. I told her I wasn’t either and we relieved her fears of not being talented enough to do artwork and my fears of not being creative enough to do artwork. Together, we did the projects each week without getting too serious about them and enjoyed each other’s company. The greatest benefit of this prolonged exposure became obvious with the final, individual project, when I told her to tell me what she wanted from the vase we would design together. “Tell me if you think it looks right; tell me if you think it doesn’t,” I told her. And she did. I think this was really important because it became clear that you didn’t need to be “an artist” to be creative. All you needed was to want to see something be created, whether thats a vase, or a painting, or a piece of music, and everyone has that somewhere inside of them.

~Ian, Senior, Art & Design

Working with Silver Club members as part of this semester’s outreach
course was so much more of an enjoyable experience than I could have ever
have hoped for. Members were always very enthusiastic and passionate about
everything they did. There was so much character in the room when I would look
around and even if someone was not entirely thrilled about what was going on
or if people were being quiet there was still so much personality and depth being
expressed. Every member was such an individual and had their own way of going
about things that was so honest and infectiously charming I couldn’t help it but to
laugh or crack a smile. Small repeated habits from week to week, warm greetings,
hearty laughter, and catching up on the weeks happenings amongst countless other
things all added up to make a unique and very genuine experience that I imagine
many will never get to experience. I greatly enjoyed the Tuesdays I spent at the
Silver Club and I hope that the members enjoyed that shared time as well.

~Kyle, UM Art & Design Student