On November 11th, the “Kestrels” class of 4th and 5th graders from Prairie Creek Elementary school came to see library exhibit mounted by Bill North’s class on Early Medieval Worlds entitled, “Process of Illumination: Scribal Imagination in the Middle Ages.” This was the culminating event of a term long exchange between Carleton and Prairie Creek.
Louis Enriquez-Sarano, Jenny Nguyen, Emma Burd, and Graeme Harten from History 137 went to Prairie Creek Elementary four times to teach the 4th and 5th graders some of what they were learning about “illuminating letters” and the relationship between word and image in North’s class. In this ACE course, students learned about ways in which knowledge and story could be conveyed or developed through images. Students studied “illuminated letters,” or large letters with images inside them, complex narrative images, gospel concordances, maps, and diagrams. They brought these concepts into Gabe Meerts “Kestrels” class and applied them to the students’ Greek Mythology unit.
Graeme Harten was one of the four who went to Prairie Creek, and he said that because the elementary students “really liked hands-on things,” the class broke up into small groups and did a lot of discussion and art projects. “I think if you just give a kid a pen and pencil the whole world’s a possibility,” Graeme said. Students drew maps of mythological Greece, made illuminated letters for different myths and Greek Gods, and created tables categorizing different myths. Graeme worked on explaining “big pictures,” which are single images that tell an entire story. He had students use a template to draw the story of King Midas on one page. “All the kids are extremely bright, so it’s a lot of fun to work with them and see where their minds would go with it,” said Graeme. “Each person’s story was different, it was kind of like a larger metaphor for stories themselves, each person takes a different thing away and seeing how those all related was pretty cool.”
The rest of the class collaborated with the community indirectly by creating the public exhibit, “Process of Illumination.” Small groups of students worked together to create a case, poster, or advertise for the public exhibit in Gould Library. For instance, junior Ben Weiss worked in a group that created a case displaying three different kinds of medieval encyclopedias. Ben said “when you are presenting manuscripts to college students or kids, who may not necessarily care about manuscripts, you need a different way of packaging the information, a way that’s more interesting.” For his case, Ben and his group included a 22-pound weight alongside their exhibit case to show how heavy some of the books were, and related them to “the world before Google,” drawing links between medieval ways of sharing knowledge and modern methods like Wikipedia or “X for Dummies” series. Most of the other stations also had interactive elements, such as bookmarks explaining different symbols in images of the apocalypse.
For Ben and Graeme, it seemed that most valuable part about this ACE project for Carleton and elementary students alike was a new way to see the world. In regards to the exhibit, Ben said “what I took away from it was not necessarily the specifics of ‘oh, this guy made this thing or that,’ but it was more about looking at something medieval and translating it to your own world. There is a lot of worth in learning about medieval history, but I think the bigger take away is taking that perspective that we put on a certain society and reversing it to show how your society sort of does the same thing.”
So medieval manuscripts may not be such esoteric ways of presenting information as we may think. The difference between the steps for a proper Christian burial expressed through a series of pictures from the Middle Ages and many “how to” illustrations of today? Not much.