Hi Shel,
With the academic theme, you use widgets to build content. You can think of them like Mr Potato Head. Your home page is currently a widget page, with multiple "active" widgets. But, you can also create separate pages on your site, outside of your home page, that contain one or more widgets. For example, my about/contact page includes several widgets:
And the source is here: https://github.com/rbind/apreshill/tree/master/content/contact
Here is some example content from a workshop where we edited the home page widget:
https://summer-of-blogdown.netlify.com/02/#47
Here is the help for widgets on the home page:
And making a widget page that is not the home page: