Grant Will Help Public Schools Teach Aging Issues

The Gerontology Institute has received $240,000 from an anonymous donor to support a two-year program aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of class activities and lesson plans that integrate gerontology-related topics into the social studies 7-12 curricula. In 1997 the same donor had provided the Gerontology Institute with a three-year grant to begin developing these lesson plans in the Ithaca City School District. The newest funding, effective June 1, will build on that program by supporting a full-time project manager to work with teachers in grades 7-12 in the Candor, Ithaca, Lansing, Newfield, Union-Endicott, and Vestal districts. The grant will also enable the institute to quantify the results of the program and develop a systematic model that can be used at the state and national levels.

"Primary and secondary school students are growing up in a rapidly aging society," says John Krout, director of the Gerontology Institute. "By incorporating information about aging into the public schools, we can increase young people’s awareness about aging issues as well as foster a sensitivity to older adults."

"Aging is important for everyone to understand," adds Zenon Wasyliw, the associate professor of history and supervisor of social studies in teacher education who, under the auspices of the 1997 grant, worked with teachers in the Ithaca City School District. "Younger people feel that older people stereotype them, and vice versa. One project we developed, an oral history assignment, brings people from opposite ends of the life cycle together and shows them they have more in common than they thought."

Oral history projects that involve students interviewing older community members are one way of encouraging intergenerational awareness. A government class that includes a discussion of the status of older people in pre- and post-industrial societies is another. Yet another is a global history class considering the industrialization of Germany in the context of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Old Age Pension Act.

"All the lesson plans the teachers and I developed were worked into the existing curriculum," Wasyliw says. "That not only saved us from having to reinvent the wheel; it also ensures that the lessons and units are in accordance with New York State standards. That means this curriculum can eventually be applied statewide and nationally."

"There’s a national interest in integrating information about older adults into the learning process in public schools, but right now there’s nothing systematic that we can use as a standard," Krout says. "The focus of this grant is to design a way to measure the effectiveness of gerontology-infused lesson plans. Intuitively, it makes sense that young people and older adults interacting in a positive way is a good experience, but when we are able to document that, we can use that information to develop standards that can be applied well beyond upstate New York."

For more information contact John Krout at 274-1965 or visit www.ithaca.edu/aging/guide/introduction.html.