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St. John’s Collaborative
for Intergenerational
Learning:
A Truly Unique Educational Program
At the beginning of Dr. David Steitz’s career, his aging studies courses
looked much different than they do now. “There would be 150 college
students sitting in front of me,” Dr. Steitz says, referring to the time
he was a 22-year-old graduate student at Syracuse University. “I’d be
talking about what it’s like to grow old because that’s what the text
book said growing old was like. It was lame.”
Today, Dr. Steitz is now an associate professor of
psychology at Nazareth College and heads the
school’s Gerontology Program. Those early attempts
at teaching about growing older helped him envision a much more authentic and
meaningful learning experience for his students.
St. John’s Collaborative for Intergenerational Learning, a truly unique educational
program for both Nazareth students and residents from St. John’s, is the product
of that vision. At the start of each semester since the Collaborative began in 2009,
a group of residents from St. John’s Meadows and Brickstone by St. John’s have
joined a full class of Nazareth students to help them understand what the aging
process is really like. Dr. Steitz insists that St. John’s residents who join the class
are not just there to provide an occasional talking point or anecdote- they actively
participate in shaping the direction of the course.
“They help create what we do throughout the semester,” he says.
As a former educator, St. John’s Meadows resident John Sinacore agrees with what
he calls Dr. Steitz’s “student-centered learning approach.” Sinacore, who worked as
a professor and chairperson of the State University of New York’s Health Science
Department, always encouraged professors to get their students out of the
classrooms and lecture halls for more experiential learning opportunities. “Once
you get students involved in exploring, they start to find the answers themselves,”
he says. John and his wife, Angie, have taken part in the St. John’s Collaborative
each semester since moving back to the area in 2014. “These are the types of
programs that attracted us to St. John’s, and enticed us to move here,” Angie says.
On Tuesday nights last fall, 18 St. John’s elders joined 25 students from Nazareth
in the St. John’s Briarwood Multipurpose Room for PSY 355 – Aging &
Community Service. Throughout the semester, students from 19 to 93-yearsold worked together on community impact projects, with the goal of identifying
some sort of segregation within the community and building solutions to bring
people of all ages an