Digital Storytelling and Museum Education: An Interview with Tilly Woodward of Grinnell College

Editor’s Note: Tilly Woodward is a museum educator at Grinnell College who participated in a StoryCenter workshop hosted by the National Gallery of Art, in July of 2018. In this interview, Tilly talks about her experience and about her future plans to work with the digital storytelling approach.

StoryCenter: Can you talk a bit about the work you do?

Tilly: I have a terrific job as Curator of Academic and Community Outreach at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery. My job is to help people connect to our exhibitions and expand their relationship to art, and sometimes to themselves and the larger world, through looking, thinking, talking, listening, writing, and making. I work with campus and community constituencies, including Pre-K through college students, neuro-diverse adults, the elderly, teachers, professors, and administrative staff, building partnerships and designing and facilitating unique learning opportunities.

Last year’s programming included 392 unique talks, gallery tours, class visits, concerts, panels, and other events, in addition to 185 meetings of our 15 regular campus and community programs. My work reaches from our exhibition galleries to area parks, the local public library, the hospital, schools, and even the county fair. I’m privileged to listen to some amazing stories—many of them deeply profound and moving—as people young and old unpack the art from their unique points of view, based on their personal experiences. And I have the joy of helping people make art, too!

StoryCenter: How did you get involved with this particular digital storytelling session that we held at the National Gallery of Art last summer? 

Tilly: The National Gallery of Art holds a Teacher Institute each summer for 25 educators from across the country, and I was honored to be included. This year’s focus was on storytelling and the visual arts—a terrific fit for me, given my concentration on art and literacy. Some of the material was familiar, and some of it, like digital storytelling, was entirely new. It was a wonderful opportunity to explore, expand, and connect.

StoryCenter: Do you have an especially impactful moment from the workshop that you can share?

Tilly: It was a remarkable experience all around. The larger program, in which the digital storytelling component played a role, challenged participants to consider and reconsider our own teaching, and explore new ways of expressing ourselves in complex, authentic ways through discussion, writing, and, finally, digital storytelling. It was such a privilege to enjoy the museum as a quiet sanctuary in the mornings, prior to opening.

Perhaps my favorite part, though, was the Story Circle. It’s rare to have time with people in that way, where they open up and tell an important truth of their lives—where they are both strong and vulnerable at the same time. We don’t often slow down and take time to listen, and listen deeply. To speak and be listened to deeply. To actually be heard.

StoryCenter: In what ways did the workshop and the story you made change the way you will approach your work from now on, both in the museum, and perhaps as an artist?

Tilly: The workshop with StoryCenter really pushed me, both personally and professionally. It was exceptional. Transformative. It was the impetus for working on hosting a StoryCenter workshop on campus this fall, on developing digital stories to help audiences process our upcoming exhibition, “Reckoning with ‘The Incident’: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural.” 

My goal is to provide a core group of people on campus with a platform for considering the question “(how) is this your story?”—to collectively think through the history of lynching and systemic violence in our country. We hope as a result to create a group that is deeply connected to the exhibition before it is even installed. The digital stories will be featured, with permission, as part of the exhibition resource area, and screened as part of programming for the exhibition.

Beyond the exhibit, I’m also considering other ways I can use digital stories with children who are struggling with literacy, and with college classes, to help students connect with our collection.

StoryCenter: Was there a part of the National Gallery workshop or its aftermath that you didn’t expect?

Tilly: Much of my life has been dedicated to taking care of other people, and nurturing other people’s creative expression—helping them express something authentic about what they see, and think, and feel. And though as an artist, it’s second nature to me to look closely and express myself, I typically do that in the quiet of my studio, where I don’t have to engage with others.

Words seem private to me, and there’s a lot I don’t talk about. My early life was both privileged and damaging, and there have been several periods in my life marked by trauma and chaos. Making art, especially painting, has provided a meditative structure that has helped me maintain a sense of order, and helping others has provided a way of leveraging damage to something better. I do write. That’s been a great tool for me. But there are very few people with whom I share my words. So the workshop put me in the unusual position of being the person supported, and sharing my own words. There’s a certain surrender in that. It took courage and energy to allow myself to be open and vulnerable. It felt both tender and liberating. It’s one of the few times in my life where I felt truly listened to and understood, and I’m really grateful to everyone involved.

It was also lovely to be in the position of learning a new medium of expression and to engage in serious play. I’d never done time-based work before, and the process of weaving together writing, speaking, images of my paintings, paintings by other artists, photos, color, layers, and movement was challenging, intuitive, and incredibly rewarding. Editing the narrative down from 1,500 words to 400 was particularly difficult—a process of paring down, letting go, focusing in, and figuring out that I didn’t have to fit everything into one digital story.

Other stories are emerging. It’s so wonderful to be 61 and learning a new way of working.

Read more about selected StoryCenter contributions to artistic practice, cultural preservation, and efforts to document local history.