At Westtown, service learning is an integral part of curriculum and all students have a variety of opportunities to engage in service projects throughout their school careers. In the Upper School, Service Network, a co-curricular offering, provides regular and ongoing projects for students. This fall, students in Service Network and a group of upper-level Spanish students took on some special community projects. 

Last spring, Service Network students worked with Farmer Bill on the Chester County Food Bank farm (grown on the Westtown School farm in partnership with Farmer Pete Flynn). They planted kale, beets, and a variety of greens—about 900 plants in total. Just before Thanksgiving this year, the plants were harvested providing quite a bounty for the CCFB.

The Service Network’s partnership with  Cradles to Crayons has also continued. Students recently spent an afternoon at the Philadelphia location to rehabilitate and clean used shoes to be distributed to children in the area. Service Network Coordinator Lara Freeman shares, “The work was tedious and required much elbow grease but the students were joyful and committed to the task!” 

Throughout the fall, Service Network offered donation boxes around campus collecting items in support of the West Chester Food Cupboard. Students drop off donations a couple times each season. So far this year, over 150.5 pounds of food and personal care items have been donated. If you’re on campus and would like to contribute, there is a box on the East End of the Main Building. 

Service Network co-curricular students also provide tutoring for the New Directions Program at the Melton Center in West Chester twice a week, they work at the SPCA in Brandywine once a week, and they make regular visits to volunteer at the Habitat ReStore on Saturdays to support the fundraising leg of Habitat for Humanity. Upcoming service opportunities will include a build project with Habitat for Humanity and a seed sorting project through the Cooperative Gardens Commission in which students will sort and make small packs of seeds for individual gardeners that will be sent to Seed Hubs around the country. Last year, this volunteer-led effort provided food for 20,000 people. 

Beginning in September, 10 students have participated in a unique service partnership at the Iglesia Buen Samaritanos in West Chester. The members of this church are primarily Spanish speaking and a number of them wanted to either improve their English or begin to learn English for the first time. Students involved in this project are: Alena Zhang ’24, Luke Cogswell ’24, Dane Clunk ’23, Noah Bay ’23, Chloe Costa-Baker ’23, Melanie Flynn ’23, Antonio Ubiera ’25, Bailey Tuckman ’25, Helena McConatha-Rosle ’24, and Maya Jain ’24, all of whom have completed Level 4 or above of our Spanish program and wish to practice both their linguistic and cultural competency in Spanish in the local community.  

Each Monday evening, these students met with Spanish teacher Cynthia Voorhees to reflect on the previous week, and make their lesson plans for the week. On Tuesday evenings, they went to the church to teach English from 7:00-8:30 p.m. Voorhees stresses that this is a significant time commitment for students on top of their regular course work.  

Eight students were paired with adults or children at the church to teach them English, and two students also taught a basic technology skills class to the Spanish-speaking adults in the community. These classes were to help adults become more comfortable with creating gmail accounts, sending emails and files, and creating Google slide presentations. All teaching in this program was done in Spanish. The tech class has now concluded, but the English classes will continue through mid-January. In February, our students will be volunteering as child-care givers while adults in the church community are engaged in another course at the church. 

Voorhees shares, “The mutually beneficial partnership that we have formed with this church is truly a beautiful thing. We are serving them, but they are also serving us by allowing us to learn more about their culture, practice our Spanish, and to grow as teachers and care-givers. Some really beautiful friendships have evolved between our students and the folks at the church. I love that our kids are making friends outside their age-bracket, socio-economic bracket, and their own culture.” Just before Winter Break, students gathered with the members of the church enrolled in the English program for a holiday dinner sponsored by Lara Freeman and the Service Network program.

This fall Westtown’s Center for the Living Arts Gallery hosted the “Art and Faith” Exhibit to mark the 70th anniversary of Fritz Eichenberg’s Art and Faith Pendle Hill pamphlet, which considered the role of art at Westtown School. The exhibit featured original prints by Eichenberg from Westtown’s permanent collection, and works by Quaker artist Todd Drake, students, and faculty. 

In 1954, Fritz Eichenberg, a German-born committed Quaker—and one of the most prominent visual arts educators of his time—visited Westtown’s campus to speak about the arts as an extension of the school’s essence. Two years prior, Eichenberg published his thoughts in a Pendle Hill pamphlet, Art and Faith. This is the 70th anniversary of that radical little work. 

Fritz Eichenberg (b. 1901, Cologne, Germany; d. 1990, Rhode Island) was a popular German-American illustrator, speaker, and educator. Eichenberg held prominent posts at the Pratt Institute in New York City and the University of Rhode Island. He fled the rise of Nazism in 1933 and was involved in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project during the Great Depression. A committed Quaker, Eichenberg’s art often focused on social justice topics. As a writer, Eichenberg composed radical pamphlets for the nearby Quaker education and retreat center, Pendle Hill. As a teacher, Eichenberg was well-known for his “The Art of Teaching Art” lecture. Perhaps, though, Eichenberg is best known as an illustrator of classic novels and for Dorothy Day’s The Catholic Worker radical newspaper. In the 1950s, Eichenberg visited Westtown’s campus as part of his ongoing participation in The Society of Friends and arts education.    

Todd Drake (b. 1961, North Carolina) is an American interdisciplinary artist, activist, and educator who lives in New York City. The recipient of multiple grants and fellowships, Drake has traveled globally to facilitate social justice-oriented arts projects. Alongside his wife, Drake is the co-operator of a Quaker intentional community in Manhattan, Penington Friends House. Drake’s most recent solo exhibition was “Rising,” a series of prints and pen and ink drawings dealing with the issue of Global Warming. His surrealistic imagery links his experiences growing up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with his concerns for what will be lost due to the rising tides of the Climate Crisis. Recently, Friends Journal published Drake’s “The Leading of Hope.” 

Director of Visual and Performing Arts Alex Ates was instrumental in bringing this exhibit to life, and the idea came to him during his visit to Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat and conference center. “The exhibit was inspired when I read Eichenberg’s Pendle Hill pamphlet Art and Faith while I was on retreat there,” says Ates. “I was stunned by the clear and vigorous way that Eichenberg connected Quakerism and art. I was further surprised to learn that Eichenberg has strong ties to Westtown, as the school invited him to speak on campus in the 1950s and purchased several of his prints for our permanent collection. When I visited the pieces in Westtown’s Archives, I was struck by the fact that Westtown has been exploring the relationship between artistic creativity and faith for quite a long time—and the past can help embolden our future as we continue those conversations today. And, it just so happened, this year marked 70 years since Eichenberg’s pamphlet was published! Immediately, I knew to pull in my colleague Lizzy Oxler, who just completed her doctoral research on Folklore, to support this exploration as curator.”

The Art and Faith exhibit ran from September 16 through October 22, 2022.  The exhibit’s opening celebration included remarks from curator English teacher Lizzy Oxler, Head of School Chris Benbow ’90, and Pendle Hill Executive Director, Westtown trustee, and parent Francisco Burgos, along with an original piano composition entitled Looking for the Light, by Mandy Zhao ’24. During the exhibition, students from across divisions had interactive experiences with the work, from an image scavenger hunt and question series for Lower School students to reflective writing prompts for Upper School English classes. 

As highlighted in the exhibit’s opening note: “Eichenberg wrote that while he lives in the Age of the Atom ‘under the shadow of the Terrible Cloud,’ he remains hopeful at the promise of art and what art can do, noting that art itself ‘has survived all cataclysms.’  In our own community, we reflect on our own version of the ‘Age of the Atom.’ We continue to live in a world of nuclear volatility and political vulnerability. And, not to mention the ever-present hum of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, we came together during Meeting for Worship, we still created productions; those practices continued and they can live together—they do right here, right where you stand. This exhibit is a timeline of the progression of these twinned spaces of art and faith, a meditation on the relationship as perceived by members of the community.

The arts have flourished at Westtown. We live in a space where art and faith are intertwined and cohesive. Bold arts education will grow at Westtown because the seeds have already been planted. So, we invite you to look forward to our past and our present.” Please enjoy photos of the exhibit here.

The World Languages Department, chaired by Bei Zhang, created a series of activities and events to promote language learning and immersion during the first-annual World Languages Week celebration at Westtown. Activities included Collection-sharing, a pep rally, a special assembly, a club period with language and cultural activities and displays, guided discussions with faculty, and the Language Olympics. Zhang says, “Some of our goals included promoting language acquisition, building cultural competency, providing students a platform to celebrate their success in their language education, and helping students envision their future career paths where they can apply their language skills and cultural knowledge.” For the special assembly, Westtown welcomed Eliza F. Al-Laham ’86. Al-Laham, who speaks Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and French, Zoomed from her residence in Mexico to share about her career in which fluency in several languages is necessary. She is currently Consul General to Guadalajara, and throughout her career has held a variety of State Department posts around the globe, including Israel, Jordan, and China. Her fascinating presentation concluded with a Q and A session with students. 

Though World Languages Week was planned by language teachers,  it was an all-hands-on-deck undertaking, as all Upper School faculty took part in facilitating events. This week-long celebration was also a unique way to assess and build language acquisition. Students made posters and cheered on their teammates in the languages they are studying, they created language and cultural activities, and teachers created special World Languages Week assignments for students. In one example, Spanish 1 teacher Samantha Godoy asked students to complete a research project on a Latinx musician or artist, which led to an interesting encounter for Kien Dang ’24, who chose to do a project on artist Rocio Navarro. “I noticed how little information I was able to get from the internet as she’s a very new artist…I was able to find Rocio’s Instagram [and] Profe Sam encouraged me to reach out to her,” says Dang. “To my surprise, she did reply! Rocio expressed a lot of excitement, as she was very eager to help with my project. I sent Navarro my questions about her life and her art. I immediately noticed that we have a lot of similarities and had an instant connection to Navarro. She often paints portraits and through these portraits she expresses her emotions. We both love using art as a form of communication and through that also explores our identities, too. I was really happy because through this project, I was able to connect with another artist that also shares the passion for art. I really have to thank Profe Sam because throughout the whole process, she encouraged me and supported me [and] the project introduced me to new vocab words that were very useful for expanding my knowledge of Spanish.” Dang displayed his painting at the cultural stations hosted mid-week, along with works from other students. Other cultural stations included Chinese fan dances, Mardi Gras mask making, a Hannibal exhibit, merengue dance lessons, and many more. 

Finally, the week concluded with the Language Olympics, a field day competition between the four languages: Chinese, French, Latin, and Spanish. There were many event stations, among them a faculty relay race, tug of peace, volleyball, tic-tac-toe relay, rock-paper-scissors race, and more. Students reveled in the friendly, sometimes rowdy competition, and in the fun and unique ways to employ the languages they are learning. Many hats off to Zhang, the World Languages teachers, and the Upper School faculty for this exciting series! You can find lots of photos of the events of the week here. 

This year’s African Dance performance by third graders was a very special one, as it marked the 20th anniversary of African Dance and the special partnership with Jeannine Osayande and the Dunya Performing Arts Company! This beloved tradition began twenty years ago this past March, when third-grade teachers Vicki Shelter and (at the time) Marc Dear began collaborating with Shelter’s friend and neighbor, Osayande, to teach third graders about the movements and storytelling of African dances and Capoeira, and their origins, symbolism, and impact.

The African Dance performance is a culmination of an extensive unit of study on the continent of Africa and its countries, cultures, and arts and a six-week residency of Osayande and the Dunya Performing Arts Company (DunyaPAC) during which they teach students West African dances and Capoeira. Osayande, Dunya PAC, and the drummers are professional performers whose mission is to teach children about African culture and its diaspora. 

Current third grade teachers Vicki Shelter and Kristin Hayman say that in the unit they ask students to explore the essential question: What are Africa’s gifts to the world? Students work together to study different regions of Africa learning about commodities, tourism, populations, and, importantly, they learn that the continent is made up of 54 countries with distinct cultures and languages. Shelter says that is one way they are trying to break stereotypes about Africa. They also work together to create a topographic map of the continent. In art classes, students learn batik and make their costumes for the performance. This year, in honor of the 20th anniversary, students made commemorative costumes with Teacher Kelly Nicholson, dying fabric indigo. 

For this year’s anniversary performance, Shelter and Hayman invited alums of the African Dance to share their memories. Folasade Beckett ’27 and Kayla Shaffer ’17 took the stage to recount their fond memories. As it happens, Beckett’s sister and Shaffer’s cousin were both performing that day! More community connections were celebrated on the stage as well. Kelly Yiadom, Lower and Middle School Equity and Inclusion Coordinator, and Marissa Colston, Equity and Inclusion Specialist, were classmates of DunyaPAC drummer Alex Shaw at Swarthmore. Yiadom, Colston, and Osayande performed a beautiful dance at this year’s performance, to honor that connection. Finally, the Capoeira demonstration this year was enhanced by third graders Morayo Beckett, Nico Ubiera, and Nico’s father, Antonio Ubiera, who are Capoeira practitioners as well. 

This special day was also marked by a special citation from the state. The citation reads, in part, “Now therefore the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania House of Representatives congratulates Westtown School and Jeannine Osayande & Dunya Performing Arts Company on their 20th anniversary of the program.” 

Osayande reflected, “It has been an honor to be here as part of the Dunya Performing Arts Company over the last 20 years. So much life has been lived and grounding it in the practice of the African Diaspora drum and dance with the third grade has been an incredible journey.”  

We offer our thanks and gratitude to teachers Vicki Shelter, Marc Dear, Kristin Hayman, and to Jeannine Osayande, Daryl Kwasi Burgee, Alex Shaw, and all the talented performers of Dunya Performing Arts Company who have been bringing this rite of passage to the third grade over the last two decades! 

The third graders’ performances, along with the special dances and demonstrations, were exceptional and steeped with special meaning. We encourage you to watch the performance here. You can also enjoy the entire gallery of photos here!