Mother-daughter project seeded during pandemic blooms into ‘untamed garden’

“Embracing the Untamed Garden” reads like a comic book — but not the kind with heroes in capes. Published in the American Historical Review, the hand-drawn visual essay shows characters talking to themselves in the mirror and students waiting beneath an hourglass filled with seeds. The focus of the essay is the mental toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting effects on students. 

The project is a collaboration between Claire Schen, associate professor of history, College of Arts and Sciences, and associate dean for undergraduate research and scholarship, Undergraduate Education, and Maddy Cherr, an illustrator and graphic designer who also happens to be Schen’s daughter.

Through intricate, carefully rendered scenes, the two capture what Schen calls “the long tail” of the pandemic through the lens of disruptions to institutions of higher education. Reflecting on their own experiences, Schen and Cherr detail a shared pressure to remain productive, even while the world around them felt profoundly unsteady.

The “Untamed Garden” refers to the messy process of failure and reorganization, which the authors attest is just as pedagogically important as perfection, though it’s often rejected. Having noted widespread risk-aversion in college students — both in Schen’s classroom and among Cherr’s own peers — the pair’s illustrations reflect a generational sense of running out of time to get their lives together, even during a global crisis.

“The title expressed our sense of stunted growth, wild growth and beauty,” Schen explains.

Experiencing opposite sides of the pandemic’s effect on their respective universities, Schen recalls the uncertainty of that time and the challenges with remote learning and instruction on her own students’ learning outcomes. Cherr, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, returned home during the pandemic, taking a year of leave from school. Living together again with these varied perspectives, the two began nurturing the seeds of their essay.

“Living with an adult child is different than living with a young child,” Schen notes. “We had different conversations than ones during their childhood or adolescence. Our family being together as adults provided opportunities for growth and understanding.”

Cherr says these conversations showed them a different side of their mother, as they realized for the first time that their mother had anxieties and feelings of insecurity in the same way they did. “I think most kids feel like their parents are infallible, and knowing my mom has a tenured academic position — something prestigious and far away from me — only increased this sense,” Cherr said.

Figuring out how to integrate these personal lessons into her academic work was new territory for Schen, who described the process as liberating. “I have never written anything for a wide audience that was this revealing of my personal thoughts or concerns,” she says.  

The call from the American Historical Review (AHR) came at just the right time for Schen and Cherr, who had been talking for years about collaborating on a project reflecting their converging experiences. Schen says AHR’s advocacy for moving beyond the traditional formats of academic work and markers of achievement inspired the pair to reflect on their growing empathy for imperfect progress.

Getting to work alongside her daughter made the work more personal for Schen. “Maddy is extremely supportive of my creative pursuits, like my learning in connection with weaving, needlework and now some knitting,” Schen says.

Adds Cherr: “Working on this project and finding that we felt in many ways the same made me feel more like friends and colleagues, but it also made me feel more normal myself when I was in the middle of a confusing, transitional time.”

The blending of skillsets was an imperfect journey, as Schen admits she wasn’t aware of the time required for creative work. She says “Embracing the Untamed Garden” not only reflects her journey as an educator, but it continues to inspire her dive into the creative aspects of her field.

She says her students, especially those in her Plagues and Pandemics course, can expect to lean into their creative side by making zines and building digital projects and maps. The most important theme she hopes to instill in her students, however, is learning to reflect and recognize their mistakes as learning tools.

“Some empathy and grace are needed for all of us,” she says.

As Schen and Cherr prepare for their next collaboration, they remain inspired by the theme of their essay: “We need to help ourselves and others face their fears of failure, of not knowing the right steps. We must support taking risks and making mistakes,” the characters in “Embracing the Untamed Garden” say as they stand before an overgrown tangle of flowers.

“I hope to carry forward the joy of embarking on such a shared project and expressing myself in new ways,” Schen says of their next project.

Schen and Cherr are featured in the “Mistakes I Have Made” episode of the American Historical Review’s “History in Focus” podcast.