Arts Directory

About

Primary Contact: Candace Wiley

The Watering Hole is invested in youth having a great relationship with literature. Period. End Stop. We could end here.

We believe that it’s difficult for learning to take place without relationship: whether that relationship is between the student and the content or the student and the teacher. We also believe that joy is key for a cultivating a lifelong love of literature. While we do ask ourselves how we can educate our classes to meet immediate learning objectives, we take the longview and prioritize their lifelong enjoyment of the subject matter.

In order to cultivate that relationship and that joy, we share living model poets that are relatable, exhilarating, and write/perform passionately on a subject that is important to the class. Then as students write, share, and perform their own work, they see the impact their words can have on their peers and begin to believe that what they have to say is important.

The technical aspects of writing enter into our curriculum as praxis, not theory. In order words, students will know what a conceit is, not because they had to memorize the definition, but because they had to write a team piece with their classmates that relied on conceit, included an allusion, and used the epistolary form to someone they want to correct.