Episode 19: Back to School

Stacey Copeland  00:01

You’re listening to the Amplify Podcast Network.

 

Elizabeth Russell  00:09

I honestly didn’t think that older adults from our community would have any interest in coming to Trent every week for a whole semester in the dead of winter, and we were overwhelmed with responses. Facilitating intergenerational connection, at least in my classroom, really showed everyone that we’re all more similar than we are different.

 

Sally Chivers  00:30

Yes

 

Elizabeth Russell  00:31

You know, if you’re grumpy when you’re 20, you’re going to be grumpy when you’re old, and it’s not because you’re old.

 

Sally Chivers  00:36

exactly

 

Elizabeth Russell  00:38

and vice versa, right? These students, and these community participants, they would be drawn to other people in a very normal way, whether it’s drawn to a similar other person or someone with similar interests, or like whatever way they connected. It wasn’t age-based. It was just people. It was this humanization of people of all ages. And now they’re like going out for drinks, going over to each other’s houses for dinner, introducing their spouses to … like all these things that are happening are what you would think of in peer groups, but they’re intergenerational, because we broke that barrier of this is what you’re like when you’re this age and this age.

 

Sally Chivers  01:18

Welcome to Wrinkle Radio, where the stories we tell about aging matter. I’m your host, Dr. Sally Chivers. And this episode, I’m going “Back to School” with Elizabeth Russell.

 

Elizabeth Russell  01:33

This community built the university to be a home for their children. [Sally: Yes] those children are now much older [Sally:yeah], and I feel a great weight to carry that tradition of why Trent was founded. Opening our doors and it was reciprocated by our participants to be like, I went to Trent, I am wearing my Trent jacket, I am so happy to be back here, or I never went to university, and I really am loving just getting this snapshot, this learning experience, and all things in between. We had a person participate who her husband was one of the founding faculty at Trent, and so she had been heavily involved from that perspective. Just having people with all their various backgrounds come back to Trent, whatever that meant? Really meaningful. That was something I wouldn’t have guessed.

 

Sally Chivers  02:24

That’s Elizabeth Russell, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Trent University. Elizabeth teaches the psychology of aging. We’re going to talk a lot about that class in this episode, and why Elizabeth reached out to the local community and asked for older adults to come in and join fully in that classroom.

 

Before we do that, because I’m going to be honest, I was a little skeptical about this classroom until I really sat down and talked to Elizabeth about it. I want you to hear how she describes what happened on the first day of class. So before this she had prepared the older adults who were going to come in, and she had had one week talking to the students, so they knew what to expect.

 

Here’s what happened next.

 

Elizabeth Russell  03:18

It was like a snowstorm that first week, of course. When I think back to the pictures, everyone is covered in snowflakes, right, and smiling faces, and it’s just a great memory. And that happened this past year as well.

 

We really spent the first week with the students saying, next week these community participants are coming in. We ask nothing of you other than just be extra welcoming to the people that are of a different age than you. Our students all were relatively young, and so they were. And that was one of the things I just … I don’t know how that’s gonna go, and they were like, that’s all I had to say. I didn’t have to give them cues … like, nothing. I just said, just be yourself, and maybe be kind of welcoming to these people, because they’re new at Trent, and they WERE.. it was amazing!

 

Their devices were down, they were just: hello! like, just, just welcoming these, these strangers, and I think that made a real difference in that icebreaking experience because there is a difference, there is a huge, obviously generational difference. And one of the things we heard from people was it was that real extra welcoming effort that I think made the difference, because these are people that were like, what did we sign up for? What are we doing? We wanted them to be there, and so just expressing that clearly and intentionally was really important.

 

Sally Chivers  04:33

We live in such an age-segregated world right now, it’s really rare to encounter people from other generations, or especially to develop relationships with them outside of the family, and so intergenerationality has become a key word when it comes to aging, and calling a program intergenerational has become a kind of quick fix.

 

I get edgy about that because when I think about the most meaningful intergenerational moments and relationships that I have in my life, they’ve never been about age. They’ve never been about building an intergenerational group. They’ve been about something else. They’ve been in knitting circles or in community choirs where we’re focused on an activity, and it just so happens that that transcends the supposed differences that we’re taught come with age, but there obviously is some texture from age cohort, and when and how people have experienced their lives that makes those communities stronger.

 

Sally Chivers  05:36

I’ve come up with, I think, a new term for what I would call this. You know NORCs? naturally occurring retirement communities? That idea of NORCs made me think about naturally occurring intergenerational spaces. You could even call it NOISE, naturally occurring intergenerational spaces, or scenarios. I’m being somewhat playful, but I do think that idea of an organic community resonates better with me who wouldn’t sign up for this kind of activity.

 

Or I wouldn’t have before I talked to Elizabeth, and the thing about Elizabeth is she’s an award-winning teacher, and she’s an award-winning researcher. She’s one of the best colleagues I’ve ever had in my life, and so I really did want to hear more from her. And I also want to be clear that she made sure to give credit to her research assistant, Tabytha Wells, who she describes being a full collaborator in this project.

 

So, let’s go back to hearing more about what they did from week one of the intergenerational classroom.

 

Elizabeth Russell  06:47

Even from week one, we’re doing these small group activities where I am not lecturing, they are in a group, they are doing a thing, and the first week obviously was just about meeting each other, and the point of those activities, we did them every week throughout the class, is connection. It’s not reinforcing course content. It’s not discuss this thing that I just lectured about.

 

Sally Chivers  07:07

Yeah

 

Elizabeth Russell  07:08

It’s unrelated. It’s totally about connection, going from welcome, come into the class, and all the students are happy and nice and welcoming. Sit down, and then I’d lecture for a bit. I’d say, you know what, I’m just going to start talking about week one aging, just to give everyone a sort of a breather, and people would be sitting all around, like there was no seating plan. It was totally organic.

 

And one of the things I had reinforced to our community participants early on was whether they had or hadn’t been to university before. Please put your hand up, please interject, please make a comment, just like we would ask of the students. And so they started doing that right away, which is really nice and great for the students to see. So that broke the ice in a more formal setting. And then we would break for the group activities to kind of let people get to know each other, and I think that removed any awkwardness that could be there.

 

Sally Chivers  08:00

Elizabeth and her team made a short video about the first year of the class, and there are many photographs from the second year. I had looked at them, and I picture people with shining faces looking at each other, looking at Elizabeth with adoration, her smiling, laughing, engaging. It honestly almost looks fake, except I know Elizabeth, and I know the context well enough to know that this is real engagement, enjoyment, happiness. One of the photographs pictures some older people and some younger students around a table, and I think it’s an older woman is about to unwrap an object, and everybody’s on the edge of their seats with interest, and this made me really curious about what these small group activities are.

 

Elizabeth Russell  08:50

The older I get, and the more I guess experienced I get as a teacher, the more comfortable I am, I think, being myself. I know what works for my students, and I know what doesn’t work, and part of that is pedagogy, and part of that is just who’s in front of them. So, if I try to be someone else, it’s not going to work. That activity works for that person.

 

Over the years, I’ve realized that creativity, artistic work in classroom, truly works, and I really get a lot of my inspiration from preschool. Honestly, I have a five-year-old daughter, as you know, and at the time, when I first created this program, she was in preschool, and the activities that were amazing. I just … you forget about that life stage when you’re academia, which is very formal and very important, and it is, right? You’re still lecturing, they still do tests, they still do essays, and all those core academic things I truly believe are critical, but when it comes to activities, I think there can be a challenge in breaking that conversational barrier, and so I go back to preschool, I go back to childhood, and I think about what are the core activities that people just do, and it’s not a weird icebreaker that everybody hates.

 

Sally Chivers  09:56

exactly.

 

Elizabeth Russell  09:57

So that activity was Show and Tell,

 

Sally Chivers  10:00

I think this is gendered too, like, earlier in our careers, if we come in seeming like a kindergarten teacher, we aren’t taken seriously as women in front of the classroom, and that confidence has to come from within, and then once you have it within, you can do whatever kind of activity, and the students will respond.

 

I’d love to hear about one of the activities.

 

Elizabeth Russell  10:22

So we basically had a few categories. When I think back, we had art making, where the intent was to create a collaborative or to do art together, and of course, there’s discussion comes from that, and we learned to put discussion prompts, not necessarily to ask people, but to help if there was, you know, and it wasn’t again related to aging or the course content. It was more related to the activity.

 

So, for example, this past year we had a class on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, and there had been so much conversation in the class about relationships, any type of relationship from our community participants, aging relationships. And so we decided, let’s do Valentines. So I went out and got Valentines stuff, and they made Valentines, and the intentional, not so much prompts, but the run-up conversation that I gave, the little preview to what are you doing, was let’s talk about relationships of every type. [Sally: Yeah], are you making a valentine for your pet, for your spouse, for your child, for your neighbor, for yourself?

 

That’s how I sort of look at prompts as embedded within the activity itself, but still can generate that rich intergenerational conversation nonetheless.

 

So, a Valentine is one activity we did this year, and it was a huge hit. People loved it, they took home a Valentine for their person, whoever that was. Another activity that we did is a scavenger hunt, [Sally: that’s a great idea] Yeah, people just get it, [Sally: yeah], yeah, it’s just easy, and because, again, the goal is to create connection. The goal is not to reinforce course content, but it does reinforce course content through connection. It’s like a sneaky thing, and we did hear from students that course content was reinforced. It’s easier to study when you can think of so-and-so in the class that talked about hearing loss, for example.

 

Sally Chivers  12:00

I think that people listening, I’m picturing the Wrinkle Radio listenership, which is quite broad, and certainly not everybody is involved in a university setting anymore, but I think they’d be curious, like, how are students graded? There could be a skeptical question, like, are they graded for show-and-tell, or there could be a, like, oh, interesting, but I’m an instructor. How do I evaluate students’ learning in a class like this?

 

Elizabeth Russell  12:25

Great question. I do fear that sort of criticism of what are you doing in this room? The cool thing about this intergenerational class is it’s an intergenerational component layered on top of a completely normal psychology course. So, what I teach in the room, like literally my lectures, and how I evaluate them, is no different than what I did before the intergenerational course in the same course. So, they have a midterm, they have a final, they have an essay. We’ve incorporated an interview component, because I think it kind of fits with that.

 

Sally Chivers  12:55

Yeah

 

Elizabeth Russell  12:56

And they do a creative project as well. They get 1% for coming to class and engaging in these activities, because it’s really important to have students in the room, so reinforcing and valuing their work there. At the end of the day, it’s a three-hour slot, you can’t lecture for three hours effectively, so it’s more of an activity that I do in my other academic classes anyways.  It’s just a little more, maybe fun, but really, there’s a balance of both. So, there’s formal lecture content balanced with this informal activity thing, which is great for the students in terms of their academics, and if you need a partner for your group work, or you missed class and you need the notes, now you have a friend that you didn’t have because you did this activity. [Sally: Yeah], so there are those sort of secret mechanisms for learning built in there, but the cool thing about it is it is a typical university course with testing and writing it just has this intergenerational section layered on top of that.

 

Sally Chivers  13:42

It’s like participatory guest speakers, but they’re there every week, like. if I was trying to translate it into terms for someone else.

 

Sally Chivers  14:01

What would you say the community participants get out of it? They don’t get the university credit, right? [Elizabeth: Yeah, that’s right], and I actually think that we undersell what we can offer in the form of a lecture to the community. I believe thoroughly in that, that I think a lot of community members welcome the opportunity to come to Trent and get to learn from this wonderful institution. I’m curious, from this course setting specifically, what would you say that participants get?

 

Elizabeth Russell  14:29

I think that I conceptualized it first in my mind as volunteers that would come in and sort of contribute. We’ve actually shifted away from that term based on feedback from our community participants, because they said we are participating, we are benefiting from this program. We just didn’t think of it that way. We thought, like, could you maybe come and do this and volunteer time, and now it’s like we’re offering you this. We didn’t know that. We didn’t know what we were offering. We thought it was about reducing youth ageism and having a really cool opportunity for everybody, but in the end community participants really felt that they benefited from participating. They loved meeting the students, the friendships that were built that were impactful and many actually enduring to this day, that happened just naturally were really beneficial, obviously, for both groups, but for our community participants.

 

Elizabeth Russell  15:17

But in terms of learning about aging, they’re living it, and so to learn the science behind aging, it’s a psychology course, so it covered biology, the psychological, and the social. To learn about that while you’re living it, I think was really good for people, because they were able to be like, “Oh, this is what’s happening to myself or my spouse or my parent.” A lot of them referred to even older parents living that as well, and this is what’s real, or this is what I can expect, and so presenting the balanced view, the research on aging versus sort of the narrative that’s in the media, or from friends, I heard this, that can be scary, or it can be intimidating, like all of those things, just being like this is what’s happening, for better or for worse, I present it in a very balanced way. I always do. It’s not about minimizing what’s happening with aging, it’s about looking at both the challenges and the opportunities of aging. And so I think going in with that balanced perspective and delivering it in that way, and for them hearing that, it’s like, okay, I get it now.

 

Elizabeth Russell  16:17

It was interesting, because when I started it, I was actually a little bit afraid, I was intimidated. It’s one thing to speak to students who are not living that age at the time, but who am I to tell this about the biology of aging or the psychology of aging, or whatever, to people who are literally experiencing it? I am not, but that was not the response. They were like, “Thank you. Now I know.” If they had more questions, I would point them in that direction, and so I felt really good about that, in terms of just people want to know about what they’re going through from a leveled scientific perspective. So that’s one benefit, the science behind aging, and not just science, you know. We also talked at length about long-term care, about retirement, about things on the social side as well, but also, thirdly, I would say coming to the university environment itself, whether they had been to university themselves in the past or not, or college, or whatever, they just loved it.

 

Sally Chivers  17:17

I know that you have talked about age consciousness in university students, but what you were describing there, I think, is a big finding of the need for age consciousness throughout our lives, including in our 60s and 70s, because we assume that someone in their 80s is conscious of aging and they’re not necessarily, because we live in such an age-denying world.

 

Elizabeth Russell  17:45

My earlier research that was done before the intergenerational component was all about can a university classroom on aging facilitate age consciousness, and we sort of came up with that term, basically someone who’s less ageist, less fearful of aging, and more knowledgeable about aging, just has a sense of what’s happening, and so that was that research, and then with this new research, Tabytha’s master’s thesis expanded that concept of age consciousness, just like what you said, to reflect people of both ages, people of all ages, really, so her newer concept is not students being more age conscious, which is really important, but it’s people being more age conscious, because what we heard about ageism was not what I would expect. I heard that students were less ageist, more age conscious, so that was good, and what we expected, but we heard the same from our community participants. They said they were less ageist against young people.

 

Sally Chivers  18:42

Wow, yeah

 

Elizabeth Russell  18:43

They had hope for the future that they didn’t have before. You know, sometimes we can have the kids these days attitude as we get older, which I think in many ways is normal, but to, because we’re siloed in our age groups in society today, but to say, like, wow, these young people aren’t insert stereotype about youth here, they’re vibrant and wonderful, and all of those things. So we heard that our community participants in doing this also became less ageist, and I think most importantly, more hopeful for the future. We heard people say, I feel better after doing this classroom about the world that my grandchildren are inheriting, because now I’ve met today’s 20-year-olds, [Sally: that’s beautiful]. I thought so too. And so the term we’re kind of playing with right now is humanization of people of all ages.

 

Sally Chivers  19:30

It is hard to find a term, and I have to say, age conscious is such a good term, it makes instant sense to people, right, to think of age consciousness. So I think it could be also just texturing and making sure people understand that age consciousness only really comes through connection.

 

Sally Chivers  19:54

At this point in the conversation, Elizabeth has me convinced that her classroom is meaningful intergenerationality, so I changed my sights to Age Friendly. Trent University, where Elizabeth and I work, is officially part of the Age Friendly Universities network. Like intergenerationality, age friendly is such a promising concept. Unfortunately, in reality and on the ground it hasn’t been as effective or inclusive or thorough as it could or should be.

 

I was director of the Trent Centre on Aging and Society when we became members of this university network. I was asked by the media what becoming members would actually change. It was a very difficult question to answer. They asked whether older adults would be able to take classes at Trent University, and of course they can, but there are a number of barriers and hoops to go through for people who may not even want course credit.

 

When I went to University of Calgary in the early 1990s, people over 65 could take courses at the university for free. And I studied English literature. A lot of people want to study that later in life, so my classes would have, as I remembered it, a wall of women sitting in the front row. In a way, this increased ageism, because we kind of resented these people who would put their hands up and do all the reading and make us look bad. Still, that policy was much more age-friendly than what I could think of in the current university sector happening during a time of the World Health Organization’s age-friendly movement.

 

Elizabeth has done research on age friendliness, so I asked her about the connections.

 

Sally Chivers  21:47

I am curious how you see this intergenerational classroom as a manifestation or response to Trent being able to really call itself an age-friendly university.

 

Elizabeth Russell  22:01

I think age-friendly is great, but I think having an intergenerational university is even better because it speaks to what we are as a university. We’re not a city, we’re a community in that sense, but we’re not a location, where we’re a university. I don’t even know a better term, right? A university is more than just a place, but we’re a university full of students. [Sally: Yeah], and so to have an intergenerational university, to say Trent is an intergenerational university. I say that all the time. I would like

 

Sally Chivers  22:29

I love that

 

Elizabeth Russell  22:29

to be an official thing, because I think that takes it one step forward from age-friendly, which, as you say, is very diffuse. Intergenerational speaks to our core mandate. It’s like, who is here? Well, we’re an intergenerational university. We have older people from the community, you know. This is a goal, not necessarily a reality, but it is also a reality, but still something to work for. But having people of all ages, people of ALL ages obviously not just older people and younger people, integrate into the university in multiple ways is important. And I think my classroom is one piece of that pie. It’s a formal piece, because it’s like a program you come in, but I think that there’s an informal intergenerational component that can be really advanced as well at Trent, or anywhere. And I think Trent has done wonderful things for this and can do more as well. There’s lots of ways that older people can be involved intentionally in the university without it being a formal, say, classroom or something else.

 

Sally Chivers  23:22

Yeah

 

Elizabeth Russell  23:22

it can be super casual. I see people walking their dogs on campus, but I’ve also heard from my neighbors, like, we don’t really want to walk there because we’re just … they’re not sure. So, I would like to break that down, so people are like able to wander around the university, see a sign for a lecture next week, and then come to that lecture next week and be engaged, so I really see a formal and an informal component to it. To me, the intergenerational university is what I want us to be. I always say my career goal is to help, because I can’t do it alone and am not doing it alone, facilitate the development of an intergenerational Trent.

 

Sally Chivers  24:00

I do think older adults are sometimes treated by universities as potential donors or not involved.

 

Elizabeth Russell  24:06

Yeah

 

Sally Chivers  24:07

right. And I understand the pressures,

 

Elizabeth Russell  24:10

yeah

 

Sally Chivers  24:11

that lead parts of the university to be that way, and that means we are responsible as faculty with the kind of power and platforms we have to work differently.

 

Sally Chivers  24:30

Intergenerational has become a buzzword and a short circuit solution, often to service provider problems. Long term care loneliness, we will solve by having seven-year-olds write postcards. You know, beautiful idea, nothing wrong with that as a project, but I think we can over emphasize the benefit of that kind of one-off activity

 

Elizabeth Russell  25:03

yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  25:03

right. Especially when it’s a little kid imagining some isolated old person, and you know the kind of framing of that. And your classroom is so different, the duration is different. You talk about the lasting relationships that come out of that, and I wonder if you have connected your work here to your earlier work on the sustainability of age-friendly practices? Programming? in rural communities.

 

Elizabeth Russell  25:33

It’s funny, because you know a lot of my sustainability research talks about barriers to sustainability, and this program was that, right? So I am facing all of those barriers myself as the program implementer. Funding is one, but that’s only one piece, and that’s what I heard in the sustainability research, like, yeah, we need more money and have it easier to access, but that’s just a piece of it. It’s burnout. This course takes triple the time to not only teach but plan as it was in its own normal course version, it’s managing all the moving parts, it’s managing parking, it’s managing food, because sometimes we have snacks and stuff, it’s managing comfortability in the class, it’s all these extra things, and so for me, sometimes I think, like, wow, this is a lot, like this is taking triple the time just to teach it class, it’s convincing others who may be skeptical that this is a good idea.

 

Sally Chivers  26:26

Yeah

 

Elizabeth Russell  26:27

And every year, sort of at the end, I say that’s that’s it, I can’t do this again. And then we start to do the interviews, and we start to hear comments trickle in from the students and the community participants, and we’re like, okay, we can’t not do this again, like people are living for this.

 

Elizabeth Russell  26:42

For me, this has been the most impactful thing I’ve done in my career. There’s nothing I’ve done that can top this I can’t imagine because of that human connection. More than ever before I think our students need that, and so I really see this as benefiting both groups.

 

We’ve talked about the benefits for community participants that I didn’t think of and didn’t anticipate, and I’m proud of, but I think for students being able to facilitate that sort of talk to the person next to you, and it doesn’t matter if they’re your age peer or they’re much older than you, but we’re also similar, and we’re going through so many of those same struggles, and I think that’s really important for today’s students, more than ever before. I do see the change, having taught obviously before the pandemic, and now, and I think anything we can do to help our students make connections, I consider that my job more than anything else, and so if I can implement this program that just seems to happen to do that more and find the resources to help me keep doing that and to streamline it so that it’s sustainable for myself as well and for the university, that’s what I’m going to keep doing, and that’s the direction I’m going to take things until I can’t.

 

Sally Chivers  27:33

That’s Elizabeth Russell from Trent University. Thank you, Elizabeth, for welcoming us into your university classroom. I hope this gives people ideas for how they can create naturally occurring intergenerational scenarios in their everyday lives. I hope this also helps people feel more welcome in the universities that might be in their communities, whether it’s attending a lecture, finding a formal class you can take, walking the dog, or, you know, listening to things like Wrinkle Radio. If you are a university teacher who would like to implement something like what Elizabeth did. There are resources available.

 

Elizabeth Russell  28:46

If any of your listeners are curious, we did create a report that’s available on our website that walks people through this.

 

Sally Chivers  28:53

I will include a link for that in the show notes, which you can always find along with the full transcript at Sallychivers.ca/wrinkle radio.

 

Sally Chivers  29:11

This has been Wrinkle Radio. I’m your host, Dr. Sally Chivers. Thank you for listening. Please tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your local university professor, and remember, don’t panic, it’s just aging.

 

Music  29:54

outro music