[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/gerentology_opt.jpg” caption=”Aging and Society”]It's a safe bet most of the 300-odd students taking professor Christopher Justice's first-year gerontology course have only an academic understanding of what it's like to grow old. Bringing the aging experience home to McMaster students in a more meaningful way is the purpose of a program that sees about 16 local seniors serve as regular seminar leaders for his course, Aging and Society.

Offered for about 14 years, the popular program brings in a slate of volunteers through weekly seminars that engage students in discussions about issues involving older people including stereotypes and images of aging, public policy, gender and aging, death and dying, and religion and spirituality.

“The general idea is that the senior class assistants are able to relay their own experience of aging, challenge students to think from different perspectives,” says Justice. “A lot of students say, 'I took gerontology as an elective but my experience with Mrs. So-and-So made me deeply interested in the experience of aging.'”

About 16 senior class assistants (SCAs) attend each seminar in pairs to discuss topics chosen with Justice. The sessions are led by students rather than by the professor. “I've never sat in on one,” he says. “It would wreck the process.”

The SCAs occasionally address the entire class during lectures on such topics as aging stereotypes and also volunteer as interview subjects for senior undergraduates doing thesis projects in the department. Early this year, for example, a student suggested a project on seniors' acceptance of and adaptations to technology that might form a research topic involving the group.

Currently only eight discussion groups of 10 students each are offered, meaning that Justice can accommodate only about one-third of the roughly 300 students in the year-long course (the remainder choose the alternative of doing community volunteer work for seniors). This year he had a two-page waiting list of students after signup day. He'd like to add two more groups next year.

For students, the program brings home issues in a way that they could never get by, say, reading about a topic in the library. “Having a conversation with older people as you're learning about aging is experiential education.”

Recalling one longtime SCA, he says, “I remember a few years ago, when his wife died he came and did a panel discussion just within days of his wife dying and stood up in front of 150 students and talked and cried. That speaks to the importance for him of what he gets out of that.”

Ranging from age 65 to 90, the SCAs include Hamilton Spectator columnist Ted Wilcox and former NHL star Leo Reese. “They really like the stimulation they get from hanging out with students. They talk about staying young, staying sharp.”

Many are also involved with other initiatives, such as Mary Sinclair, 66, who belongs to the Older Women's Network and the seniors advisory committee for the City of Hamilton, and serves on the boards of directors of Freedom House and the Community Housing Access Network.

She often shares her insights about health care and disability issues, drawing on her former nursing career and a lifelong disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair.

Sinclair particularly enjoys the chance to do some myth-busting with students. Allowing that she's always knitting, she says, “Certainly I don't sit and bake cookies for my grandchildren.”

That works both ways. Referring to her students, she says, “The hardest one I have is to stop saying kids. They're young people, I've got to remember that.”

Sinclair recalls running into one former seminar student during a visit to a third-year class. “She was able to tell her classmates how I made things come alive in terms of different aspects of aging. It meant that she had actually listened.”

Photo caption: Seniors Dorothy Lounds and Hugh Brenian hav a discussion with a group of students in Christopher Justice's first-year gerontology class.