Community Memorial Quilt
Live Together/Learn Together
Community Memorial Quilt
Live Together/Learn Together
Melissa Kaplan – Joe Esquibel – Jim Luke – Barbara Clauer – Anne Heutsche – Jeff Janowick – Suzanne Bernsten – Megan Lin
Live Together/Learn Together is a story-sharing space created for Lansing Community College students, faculty, and staff to share our experiences with and reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our creative response outlines its purpose, how it was developed, and some examples of what it contains. Prose, poems, written or spoken word, art, photos, monologues, movies and more may all be posted, as long as the contributor is part of the LCC community and the submission pertains in some way to COVID.
Before the considerable dust had even begun to settle from the sudden, urgent rush to move classes online last spring, to turn homes into offices, to work and learn remotely, before faculty and students could catch their breath or catch a bandwidth break, Lansing Community College Biology professor Joe Esquibel thought about building community and preserving history. Joe had an idea to create an open learning lab website where any LCC student, staff or faculty member could post writings or images responding to their Covid experiences.
A cross-disciplinary team quickly formed: Economics professor Jim Luke took the lead and engineered the site, English professor Barbara Clauer with History professors Jeff Janowick and Anne Heutsche created prompts, librarian Suzanne Bernsten and Arts Outreach coordinator Melissa Kaplan proofed and promoted, all supported by LCC’s Center for Teaching Excellence, the scholarly commons for LCC, directed by Megan Lin.
Within two weeks, Live Together/Learn Together went from idea to reality.
Launched April 8, the site was soon receiving a steady stream of posts. Some faculty made story-sharing a class assignment. Some people posted multiple stories. With humor and heartbreak, anger and angst, fear and even a little frivolity, the posts – both simple and sophisticated – created a valuable outlet for students, faculty and staff as they struggled to process this life-changing pandemic.
Today, more than 100 stories and images are posted at https://livetogether.openlcc.net/
Fall semester is underway, and the posts, processing and preservation continues. With time to reflect and learn from the initial rush and uncertainty, will the stories change or remain themed with heartbreak and hope? What continues, most importantly, will be a place for all at LCC to explore and share, a place to cultivate community and to develop a much-needed sense of belonging.
A written post from Live Together/Learn Together posted April 18, 2020, author’s permission granted to share in this creative response
The Banana Peel Menace by Fred Engelgau
It is said that we are all given a guardian angel at birth, a companion for life. Seen in the good deeds we do, heard in the encouraging words we say, felt through the affirmations we make. Guardian angels around the world are working overtime during this crisis, but not because people are living devil-may-care lifestyles with one foot on banana peels and the other in the afterlife. What the angels are doing twenty-four hours a day is running around picking up banana peels. The disregard for stay safe directives is a banana peel. Cheetos are a banana peel, but then again, they always were. Blame and condemnation are banana peels. Swindlers, grifters, con men, the self-righteous, the holier than thou, the hypocrites, the mud slingers, the name callers, oh what a beautiful bunch of ripe banana peels. My guardian angel is proud of me because I’ve been lending a hand, as are many others, with their spiritual landscape beautification project. We’ve a long way to go before the land fill is nothing but banana peels. The good news is there will be no delay in pick-up due to the current crisis.
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