Conference
| Film Analyses | Games
| Culture Research | Final
Paper | Final Exam
Students
Attend American Society on Aging Conference
To
meet the course requirement of becoming involved in a
national organization, Ms. Jean Raymond (pilot course
instructor) took the three pilot students to the July
2002 American Society on Aging conference in Philadelphia.
To save money at the three-day event, she volunteered
her students' room monitoring services. This afforded
the students a special opportunity to enhance their learning
in one-on-one exchanges with nationally recognized speakers.
One student, Jennifer Genna, kept a journal of her responses
to several of the conference lectures:
Until
listening to the presentation "Diagnosis and Treatment
of Personality Disorders [PDs]," wrote Jennifer,
she "hadn't really considered looking at clients
in terms of PDs. It makes sense that a PD wouldn't necessarily
just disappear as you get older."
Another
lecture, titled "Medical, Legal and Ethical Aspects
of Decisional Capacity in Elders," helped her understand
that decisions about mental capacity should never be taken
lightly. Instead, she writes, they require "a
full history, administering a mental status exam, reviewing
labs, and reviewing treatment history in addition to administering
various tests of functional competence."
Finally,
her journals show that she thoroughly enjoyed a presentation
on Brain Aerobics, which taught her that "laughter
opens our minds to creative thinking, draws oxygen to
the brain, lowers our levels of cortisol which boosts
our immune system and stimulates our heart and lungs."
She was also fascinated to learn that 100 laughs a day
equal 10 minutes of rowing.
Students
Examine Popular Films about Older Adults
Students
were asked to analyze portrayals of older adults in the
media, particularly in movies. They chose from a list
of movies that included:
Finding
Forrester
On Golden Pond
Driving Miss Daisy
Fried Green Tomatoes
Pay It Forward
Twelve Angry Men
Grumpy Old Men
Calendar Girls
Twelve
Angry Men
Several students chose to analyze the 1997 remake of 12
Angry Men starring George C. Scott, Tony Danza, James
Gandolfini, Jack Lemmon, and Hume Cronyn. Of the twelve
jurors, four are older characters portrayed alternately
as confused elders and patient wise men. Dr. Susan Loeb
(permanent course instructor) reports that this film elicited
strong student reaction and spirited discussion regarding
the treatment of senior jury members by younger jury members.
Grumpy
Old Men
Grumpy Old Men also aroused a strong response from student
Mark Bashford in his paper about media portrayals of older
adults. Mark writes that the film exemplifies a tendency
among media producers to combine both positive (fulfilled,
active, understanding) and negative (cantankerous, lonely,
idle, financially dependent, frail, non-sexual) portrayals
of the elderly. In the film, two older gentlemen neighbors
are in a life-long practical joke war with each other
that intensifies when an attractive widow moves into the
neighborhood.
Mark
ultimately concludes that most people do not know much
about older citizens, which makes it "a difficult
task to distinguish the false generalizations from the
true representations." He does, however, see his
future nursing career as an opportunity to provide quality
care to the geriatric population, and to be "better
able to identify those stereotypes and prejudices that
are commonly accepted by the general population. This
understanding enables me to educate people on the frequent
misconceptions of the older adult."
Students
Play Aging-Related Games
At
the Summer Series on Aging, Ms. Raymond purchased a geriatric-related
board game, created by Oregon State University Extension
Services.
Game
participants pick cards from several piles, including
a Families and Aging pile and a Dilemmas and Decisions
pile. Each card presents some kind of geriatric-related
problem that the students discuss and solve. The situations
might involve parent-child relationships, the high cost
of health care, ethics, or dealing with elderly parent's
loss of cognition.
Dr.
Loeb observed that the game stimulated much informal discussion
regarding the students' own families.
Students Pick Cultures to Study
Students
pursue yet another interactive activity as they examine
cultural differences among the aging population. Each
student interviews a senior from a cultural group of his/her
choosing. Some students chose to study attitudes within
their own cultures by interviewing their grandparents.
Others chose to interview older adults from Chinese, Polish,
Italian, Irish, or Appalachian heritage, to name a few.
This year, for the first time, one student focused his
research on the attitudes of homosexual older adults.
During
interviews, students posed a number of questions in the
following subject areas:
