The first event of the inaugural Teach-In on Timely Topics was a workshop, craft talk, and lecture blend by Livia Meneghin, MFA ’21, an affiliated faculty member in the writing, literature and publishing department. For one hour in Piano Row’s Beard Room, a dozen teachers and students gathered to take part in Meneghin’s programming, exploring how poetry can connect individuals.

Meneghin shared multiple prompts with the group related to the idea of poetic ancestors — poets who came before the present day, whose work has influenced one’s own. She highlighted the importance of reflecting on what qualities, adjectives, or verbs are associated with these writers. 

She also presented some of her favorite poems, including “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black woman appointed poet laureate of the United States. Meneghin then prompted the group to write a poem in response to Brooks’ by taking any part of the poem and “making it [ours].”

Meneghin presented an example of a response to Brooks’ poem, “The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes. Hayes embedded Brooks’ poem into his own response, but found creative ways to expand upon the groundwork Brooks laid. “An American Sunrise” by Joy Harjo followed in the same footsteps, writing her own “golden shovel,” or an homage to a previously published poem. 

Homage poetry, Meneghin said, is an example of keeping ancestors in mind, sometimes by including an epigraph, dedication, or mention of someone within a line. One form of homage poetry is “cento,” or a collage of various works, scavenged and rearranged to create a new piece of work. The example she gave was “ Cento Between the Ending and the End” by Cameron Awkward-Rich. 

Meneghin presented the “Seven Generations Principle,” a concept originating from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also referred to as the Iroquois people. The principle teaches that “the decisions we make today should protect and sustain seven generations in the future, while honoring and learning from the seven previous generations that have passed.” 

This, Meneghin said, is representative of the virtues of poetic ancestry, and how people can “honor and know who’s come before.” She said this knowledge is “greatly under attack,” threatened by technology, artificial intelligence, and waning attention spans. 

“We exist in this continuum that we are all dependent [on] each other,” she said in her presentation. 

The last prompt asked the group to draft a poem that includes one thing that connects them to their poetic ancestor, and to visualize a world that feels safe, sustainable, joyful, and free.

“We started by remembering who’s with us, then we honestly and authentically responded to art in our own way, then we’re finishing by thinking about what we want for our own future,” Meneghin said. “Those are the three things that I want you to carry with you.”

Emerson College’s annual Teach-In on Timely Topics continued on Tuesday, March 3. with Building Rituals for Return: The Emerson Prison Initiative, the Arts, and Reentry. The session included a panel and a presentation on the topic of returning to society after incarceration. 

Panelists included faculty members from EPI, a higher education program that offers incarcerated individuals a pathway toward earning their bachelor’s degrees. They were joined by New Beginnings Reentry Services and Ritual4Return (R4R) partners.  

Organizers from R4R, a 14-week reentry program for formerly incarcerated individuals, described their process of returning citizens from “incarceration to freedom,” per their website. The Teach-In website said that panelists would discuss their work in “arts-based” reentry. 

“The project is anchored by a belief that bringing communities together to hold stories of pain and harm with intention, accountability, and care is how we begin to heal,” it read. 

Panelists included Lizzy Cooper Davis, R4R Boston director and associate professor and graduate program director; Charles Rosario, EPI program coordinator and R4R core partner and co-facilitator; Stacey Borden, founder and executive director of New Beginnings Reentry Services and R4R core partner and co-facilitator; and Cara Moyer-Duncan, acting director, EPI and associate professor.

During a Tuesday afternoon Teach-In On Timely Topics session, faculty and students got a chance to tap into their childlike whimsy, constructing puppets out of paper.

The Teach-In event, “Grief and Memory in Times of Change: An Artistic Workshop with ArtsEmerson & The Artists of Dead As A Dodo,” had participants work as a team to help their creations come alive as they explored themes of death, friendship, and transformation.  

Joye Prince, the engagement programs coordinator for ArtsEmerson who introduced the session, said the workshop aimed to connect back to “Dead as a Dodo,” a musical about the adventures of a skeleton boy and a dead dodo bird who journey into the underworld. The performance covers themes of loss and transformation through the use of puppets. 

“[The show] sparked a connection for me around the idea of death and grief,” Prince said in an interview with The Beacon. “But the show is also about moving through these transitions with a lot of joy and resilience.”

The workshop was led by the directors of the musical, Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage, who are also the artistic directors and founders of Wakka Wakka, a theatre company based in Oslo, Norway. Their work’s goal is to “push the boundaries of the imagination,” and to create works that are “bold, unique and unpredictable,” according to their website.

The pair first led the audience of about a dozen faculty and students in stretching and improv exercises as a way to “loosen up” before creating their puppets. Then, using Kraft paper and tape, participants were asked to use their emotions and instincts as a guide for creating their puppets, which ranged from a flat-faced gingerbread man to a moonwalking alien. Participants were given a short amount of time to make their puppets, with the emphasis being on acting before thinking.

Prince said that the workshop connected to the show’s themes of grief through its emphasis on community and bonding with objects.  Prince said that, as someone who deals with grief in both their work and artistic practice, they have observed how people use objects, such as journals or candles, as conduits for holding grief. In the workshop, the puppets became this object for the participants.

“[The workshop] was kind of reflecting on the idea of a puppet as a disembodied figure that can hold or express things that we maybe can’t express,” Prince said. 

After finishing their puppets, Warnock called up three people at a time to choose one of the puppets, which they worked together to move cohesively at Warnock’s instructions. Through her guidance, Warnock wanted to show how the puppets’ small movements are capable of producing “big feelings in the audience when they’re watching the show.”

Warnock also emphasizes how puppets have been used in culture for humans and religion. 

“They’ve been used as a point of reference for death or God,” she said in an interview with The Beacon. “So [puppets are] used for talking about things that are difficult to process and things that happen in our lives, and or things we aren’t able to explain.” 

For students like Nel Blinman, a senior anthropology and puppetry as a subversive art interdisciplinary major who attended the event, puppetry can help people unlock “a state of freedom that I don’t often see in people.”

“In doing puppetry, my goal has always been to try and get back that authenticity of play with these objects, whatever form they take,” Blinman said. 

Community, Culture, and Belonging Vice President Shaya Gregory Poku and Hub for Inclusive Visionary Engagement Program Manager Crystal Gómez were also in attendance. Both Poku and Gómez actively participated in the puppet exercise and worked with other participants to bring the puppets to life.

About 30 people gathered at the Robert J. Orchard stage in the Paramount Theatre for the Teach-In on Timely Topics’ keynote panel on public knowledge, memory, and legacy, the pillars of the inaugural Teach-In. 

Panelists included Michael J. Bobbitt, artist and CEO of OPERA America, and Roosevelt Montás, Bard College professor, whose conversation was moderated by Amber Lee, assistant professor in the writing, literature and publishing department at Emerson College. The panel opened with remarks from Emerson President Jay Bernhardt, who said this year’s topic is “particularly timely” due to the “turbulent times we’re in” economically, socially, and politically. 

“What we do here matters,” he said, before passing it off to Shaya Gregory Poku, the vice president of the division of Community, Culture, and Belonging. Poku recognized the work being done at this year’s Teach-In to document and archive reflections regarding the former Teach-In On Race, which was held yearly from 2016 to 2025. She also recognized this past February as the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, a commemoration originated by American historian and author Carter G. Woodson.  

Poku closed by saying, “The question is not whether or not public knowledge and memory will change — they will. The question is, who shapes it?”

She then passed it off to Provost Alex Socarides, who introduced Bobbitt, Montás, and Lee to the stage. The three began discussing what public knowledge, memory, and legacy mean to them — namely, how they shape our sense of self, and how our sense of self shapes the past, present, and future. 

“Public knowledge, memory, and legacy feel conceptual to me … Memory and legacy feel like mechanisms to democratize public knowledge,” Bobbitt said, before delving into how “facts” are often determined by who holds the most power and privilege in society, as they often have the heaviest hand in defining the dominant narrative. 

Montás then raised the point of the overabundance of information that is commonplace in society due to the internet, which he called “suffocating” and “fracking our attention.”

Bobbitt said stewards of public memory and knowledge — such as institutions of higher education, art and culture centers, and those who uphold the canon of American literature and history — have to be intentional with their delivery of this information. Montás concurred, saying these institutions have a “particular responsibility” or “burden” in constantly reexamining the past.

“To the degree that we are blind to the past, we fly blind to the future,” he said.

The two then discussed how important dissent and disagreement is to a healthy democracy and the upkeep of preserving public knowledge, memory, and legacy.

“You’re not the moral enemy just because you disagree with me. You’re [still] human,” said Bobbitt, emphasizing the importance of “pluralism,” or the simultaneity of multiple different points of view being at the forefront of the conversation around public knowledge.

Montás added that one of the great philosophers of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, was a student of Plato. However, he did not simply espouse Plato’s teachings unchanged; he often revised them, refuted them, and made them his own. This, to Montás, is exemplary of how “culture is living.”

The floor was then opened for questions from the audience. Crystal Gomez, program manager of the Division of the Hub for Inclusive Visionary Engagement, said she’d been “thinking a lot about erasure, especially right now, especially as it relates to this Teach-In,” and asked how people like her — members of the Emerson community — can combat that.

The panelists encouraged her and the rest of the audience to engage in dissent, disagreement, and thoughtful conversation, especially as it pertained to subjects the federal government might like to engage in “revisionist history” about, such as the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

One student asked how individuals can be responsible stewards of public knowledge, legacy, and memory. Bobbitt responded, saying, “You all as young people have to design the world you want to see.”

Montas added, “Find the junctures in the public conversation that matter most to you.”

The Teach-In continued Thursday at 2 p.m. with “Making Truth Visible: Art, History, and Public Memory,” a panel conducted over Zoom. The event aimed to examine how truth is preserved and safeguarded through libraries and archives, and argued that AI and new technologies affect our comprehension of truth. 

The panel was moderated by Zoë Wyner, the executive director of the ProArts Consortium, of which Emerson is a member. She introduced Chantal Zakari, associate dean of curriculum and instruction for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. 

Zakari opened her portion of the event by defining truth as a way to gauge reality that can be proven or disproven. She said that artists of differing mediums engage with truth in different ways that would be discussed during the event. 

“Artists are invested in making truth visible on many levels, but art is generally subjective,” she said. “The work depends on personal interpretations and emotional responses based on individual experiences.”

Zakari then introduced Gino Canella, associate chair and professor of journalism at Emerson. Canella discussed his work as a documentary filmmaker and the new need for anonymity in protest movements. He pointed to an ongoing debate within the film industry on how to cover protests respectfully and protect sources, while also maintaining transparency and objectivity. 

He said that he approaches this debate by asking “how new surveillance technologies and the political economy of media complicate journalists’ ability to document dissent.” 

“Sometimes we think about journalism as a profession or as a trade, but thinking about it as a field, I think, opens it up a little bit more and considers the fact that it’s highly contextual,” he said. “Practices are constantly changing; things that are acceptable today may be rejected or revised at a later date.”

Canella cited a number of historical instances of mass protests in which photojournalists blurred faces in their coverage. He recalled a journalist asking if this practice is ethical.

“If everyone’s faces are blurred, does it imply that everyone is doing something illegal?” the journalist had asked. “Someone said people who fail to recognize the imbalance and inequity are most often those who stand to benefit from it in terms of the ethical fissures and competing responsibilities.” 

Ekua Holmes, associate director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, followed Canella’s presentation. She spoke about her work as a children’s book illustrator, and how she consulted archival photos while creating art for a children’s story on Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was a civil rights movement leader, and and women’s rights advocate. 

Holmes spoke on how it’s crucial to educate children on important historical events that shape our lives today. 

“And some people would say, that’s a pretty heavy message for children, and that’s true, but our children are growing up in heavy times, and they’re living heavy lives,” she said. “So both the author and myself felt like it was really important to put this in so that they would understand … [how] we have some of the freedoms that we have today.” 

Stacy Snyder, the associate director for instruction and engagement at The Library at Berklee College of Music, spoke about the gender gaps that exist historically in jazz. She said that it was a largely male-centered genre, asking “What would the music sound like if many of the contributors were women?”

“Some people would say, well, there just weren’t enough women around. But what we have to look at is the machinery, social, economic, political, that didn’t allow those voices

to flourish,” she said. “The jazz industry, which has been predominantly male, has echoed the biased system from which it emerged.”

Berklee’s library is attempting to bridge these gaps, hosting regular Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons, where students are invited to create and edit articles about women in jazz on Wikipedia. 

“I think it helps to bring conversations about who isn’t included and why they should be and what makes that a barrier,” she said. “Maybe they’re not cited around enough to meet the notability standards. So we need to be doing a better job of making a record of the work that they do.”