CLAS Acts May 2022

Monthly newsletter of the TT faculty of CLAS

A Note from Dean Drake

The finish line for this term is in sight!  Before we turn to the summer ahead, I’d like to thank you for including me in many of your unit celebrations—these events are one of the pleasures of the season.  I was glad that last Wednesday we had a chance to celebrate our own accomplishments (and sheer survival) and come together on the Calder lawn for some light-hearted fun as well as the serious business of thanking our award winners for their great service.  I’d like to give a special shout-out to Mona Silva, Sally Ross, the Dean’s Office, CLAS Faculty Council, and the Visual and Media Arts Department, without whose collective support there would not have been popcorn, cupcakes, a heated tent, and games with give-aways.

 

The simple things like attending commencement, serving on committees, engaging in scholarly and creative activity, and directing students to appropriate resources are all more challenging in a time of change.  It’s been gratifying to see your efforts rewarded with good news on everything from student filmmakers and beermakers winning competitions, to our faculty’s major book award nominations and Fulbright fellowships, to our famous blooming corpse flower.

 

You have been sending a clear message that you want to better support students, and that you could use support to do so.  I’m happy to report that we have been able to hire additional advisors and make enhancements to the CLAS Tutoring Center, all of which will help in that regard.  The Reading Center is becoming a reality, and will be embedded in the CLAS Tutoring Center.  As Betty Schaner explained, “Tutors who will be extensively trained in reading strategies across all content areas will offer reading and comprehension support to all Grand Valley students.” Over the next year we will be working with unit heads, faculty, and staff to calibrate our support to the needs of students.  

 

As you saw in Wednesday’s Weekly Mailing, the implementation teams for the CLAS strategic plan have been constituted and formally begin work this week.  We will be working toward the aspirations you identified, and tackling the challenges.  We will work very intensively this summer so that we are ready to pilot some of our efforts as early as this fall.  In addition to reviewing our archive, gathering additional data, conducting literature reviews, and brainstorming, the teams are undergoing some internal training and a group will be attending the AAC&U Institute on High Impact Practices and Student Success.  We are also new members of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, which supports faculty, staff, and students interested in community-engaged scholarly activity.  Check out this month’s feature article on community-based work that Jing Chen’s students have been doing through a new campus resource—Grand Connections. We are already doing great work all across the college, and we will continue to share our approaches and build upon that foundation.

 

Academics never take the sort of break in the summer that some in the public imagine; nonetheless, I wish you as many opportunities to rest and recharge as you can muster.  Some of you will turn to summer teaching, others to your research, and all of us will take up the life tasks that tend to be pushed to the bottom of the list during the academic year.  I wish you every success in all these endeavors.

 

Best,

Jen

Intergenerational adventures and SAGE wisdom

The literature is rife with examples from myriad studies around the world about the benefits of intergenerational interaction, despite our cultural tendency away from it.

Professor of Public & Health Administration Priscilla J. Kimboko notes that Becca Levy (Yale University) in her new book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live, explains that “meaningful intergenerational contact can be a way to improve age beliefs. A starting point is to think about your five closest friends and what age they are. In my case, I realized that most of my friends were within a couple of years of my age. If that’s the case with you, think about ways to get to know people of other ages through a dance class, a book club, or a political group. Seeing older people in action often allows us to dispel negative age beliefs.”

In the summer of 2021, Priscilla and her colleagues Jing Chen from Psychology and Heather Wallace from Public Heather worked with representatives of AARP to develop Grand Connections: An intergenerational program to bring together people of different ages around common interests and to let each generation overcome age-related stereotypes. 

Jing piloted the Grand Connections program in Fall 2021 and again this semester in her course PSY 366: Perspectives on Aging.  She mapped out a two-pronged project that would see her students reviewing the literature of intergenerational integration and then taking part in co-mentoring activities.

About a quarter of her students were each carefully paired with an older adult from the Grand Connections program based on their interests. The remaining students had an older relative or friend as their partners.   

The interactions were structured so that each intergenerational pair would engage in co-mentoring and activities on at least three occasions.  These activities were highly individualized by each pair. 

Many of the almost 50 students in Jing’s course participated in activities with their older adult ranging from taking food and clothes to the homeless to building a shelf to apple picking.

In addition to their conversations, each person taught the other something. The older adults helped the students build skills (such as making family recipes, needlework, fishing, gardening, winter window insulation, weeding, writing essays and poems). The college students tended to teach technological skills (such as streaming movies and online shopping for holiday gifts) or shared what they were learning in their college classes (such as research on exercise, stress, mental illness, etc.) or taught skills they had such as how to play the piano or lacrosse, to use youth lingo, and even to engage in rock climbing.

Their conversations were wide-ranging and often deeper than they had attempted previously. Topics ranged across sexual and gender identity, politics, family stories, life histories, perceptions of age, and ALS. 

The students wrote a series of journal reflections, and the older adults had the opportunity to provide feedback on the project.  They found that they were discovering life lessons from dealing with loss to work ethic to career choices.  Students often found that the project humanized both participants and stretched their perceptions beyond stereotypes. One student talked about the experience as “joyous.”  Others wrote about how it made the course topics easier to understand. The older adults talked about the mutual benefits and strongly urged Jing to continue the project (“never stop doing this!”).

The project outcomes clearly demonstrated that student engagement was high, there was continuity across the multiple interactions, the journal reflections were thoughtful, and the interactions were mutually beneficial.  So beneficial. in fact. that Jing and her students launched SAGE (Students for Aging and Gerontology Enrichment), a student club to enrich lives of both older adults from our community and students at GVSU. Psychology major, Aging and Adult Life minor, Sydney Spotts became the first president of SAGE. They have had several meetings joined by members of Grand Connections.  

Priscilla and Jing are now searching for a Grand Connections GA who will help provide the communication and administrative support that the program will need to scale. This support will help them fully develop the program and make it available across campus for high-impact experiential learning as well as for research projects involving older adults.