Emily Dickinson Museum

For the second year in a row, the Emily Dickinson Museum partnered with the Amherst schools on Emily Dickinson: Poetry, Poet, and Place, a curriculum development initiative funded by a Creative Schools grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  The essential goal of this project was to design and implement primary level and high school level poetry curricula for which Dickinson’s poetry functions as the exemplar.

Teachers from four elementary schools met for an afternoon with landscape historian Marta McDowell (author of Emily Dickinson’s Gardens and consultant to the New York Botanical Garden’s Dickinson exhibit) and Helen Ann Sephton (from the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, located in Amherst) for a workshop to discuss how Emily Dickinson found poetic inspiration in the natural world (our “world” of Amherst!).  Participants also practiced nature journaling and toured the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum, the land that Dickinson herself walked when she lived at the Homestead.   Afterward, teachers spent a day creating curricula that explores Dickinson’s love of poetry and nature while developing the students' own skills in analytical thinking, observation, and creative writing.

At Amherst Regional High School, teachers in the English department enjoyed seminars with Martha Ackmann, Dickinson scholar and journalist, and Christopher Benfey, Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, to discuss Dickinson’s life and poetry.  Teachers in the program developed units on Dickinson’s poetry that include visits to the museum. The Museum is especially grateful to Wendy Kohler, recently retired from her position as Executive Director of Curriculum and Program Development for the Amherst and Amherst Pelham Regional School Districts, for initiating and coordinating the program.  In addition, the Museum thanks Rena Moore, Pelham Elementary School Principal and curriculum coordinator for the school district during the 2009‐2010 school year for her support for this initiative.  The Amherst public schools and the Emily Dickinson Museum look forward to their evolving partnership with Amherst teachers.

The Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) is a state agency that promotes excellence, access, education and diversity in the arts, humanities, and interpretive sciences to improve the quality of life for all Massachusetts residents and contribute to the economic vitality of our communities.  MCC receives an annual appropriation from the state Legislature and funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Foundation, and others.