Essentially GFS Continues Essentially English’s Tradition of Intergenerational Learning

This October, a series of evening classes launched at GFS under the name Essentially GFS. A spiritual successor to the school’s Essentially English program, these classes, which were open to anyone in the GFS community, met on Wednesday evenings from late October through mid-December in the Abigail R. Cohen Center for the Arts in the All School Commons. 

Essentially English was founded at GFS in 1978, funded by a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, out of a desire to bring learners of different ages together. In the last quarter of every year, sophomores, juniors, and seniors would meet for their English classes in the evenings, often accompanied by their parents, grandparents, and other community members. The program was sunsetted in 2022, but there remained a desire to provide a platform for similar learning experiences. This desire paved the way for Essentially GFS.

“I love the concept of people in different stages of their lives—students, alumni, former teachers, former and current parents—coming together to experience the caliber of the faculty and the education that we offer here,” said GFS Director of Academic Program Carol Rawlings Miller. 

The interdisciplinary, intergenerational courses were collaboratively developed between Rawlings Miller and the faculty. In planning, they established a diverse array of disciplines that reflect GFS’ ongoing practice of engaging with current events and emergent topics in a critical, nuanced way. 

“Essentially GFS is a way for people to get to know who GFS is right now, and to learn together with teachers who are thoughtfully shepherding the class to encounter relevant and sometimes urgent issues, questions, and art forms,” Rawlings Miller noted.

Parents, students, alumni, parents of alumni, and faculty and staff were invited to register for the courses, which included: 

• Learning from Alligators: How to Live through Global Change with Adam Rosenblatt ’02 (Upper School science faculty)
• Self-Invention in America: From Ben Franklin to Beyoncé to Donald Trump with Rob Goldberg (head of Upper School history) and Adam Hotek (Upper School English faculty)
• Quakerism and Why it Matters: History, Faith, Practice with Andrew Malkasian (Upper School history and Quakerism faculty) and Dorothy Cary ’75 (former Middle School history faculty)
• ArtWrite Workshop with Anne Gerbner (former head of Upper School English department) and Caroline Santa (Upper School art faculty)

Caroline Santa and Anne Gerbner first co-taught during May Term, when January Term was bumped to May in 2021 due to the pandemic. Their joint effort was Art of the Journal, an evolution of an Essentially English class, Writing and Painting, that Gerbner developed in 2019 with landscape painter and GFS art faculty member Debra Hoffman.

ArtWrite Workshop was born from those experiences. Both teachers were enthused about the prospect of once again working together, evolving the art and writing workshop, and helping to launch the first Essentially GFS session.

“Having taught Essentially English classes for many years, I am happy to be part of a reincarnation of that amazing GFS program!” Gerbner noted. “GFS is remarkable for encouraging collaboration and experimentation.”

“The class has moved into different areas of the school and covered a variety of topics, and changes every time it reincarnates,” Santa added. “That gives me a sense of expansiveness and openness, which makes me want to keep teaching and making art!” 

ArtWrite Workshop students studied artists and authors with parallel practices or perspectives before creating their own artist’s journal. Classwork included short texts by Sei Shōnagon, Gertrude Stein, Maggie Nelson, Harryette Mullen, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Tracy K. Smith, and explored the techniques of Mark Rothko, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Kara Walker, Titus Kaphar, and others. 

During each Wednesday class, students in the workshop responded to prompts around a shared theme, experimenting with poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, satire, watercolor, ink and paper, gold leaf, color, cubism, and paper arts, such as marbling and weaving. 

For Charley Levin ’26, one of the highlights of the workshop was reading excerpts from Bluets, a lyrical essay by the author Maggie Nelson.

“She wrote about the color blue and her connection to it—it’s based on a painting,” Levin said. “The pieces were incredible, and we looked at the painting and thought about how it connected with the writing. It opened up a middle ground between writing and art.”

Levin is a visual artist who primarily works with black and white ink to create drawings and illustrations. She said that ArtWrite Workshop encouraged her to dabble outside of her comfort zone: to experiment with other mediums, play with color, and explore abstraction. Being in the class with people of different ages and backgrounds also enriched her experience.  

“There was such a wide variety [of people in the class] and I learned a lot about each of them because they put a lot of their backstories into their art and writing,” Levin noted. “It was beautiful to see how people did that through different styles and mediums. I loved getting all that exposure.”