Professor of Sociology Renée Beard and the St. Mary Health Center were awarded a Scholarship in Action grant in winter 2023. Their project will work to redress at a local level the social inequities and vulnerabilities within the American nursing home industry that social gerontologists have spent decades trying to address and that the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare. Beard’s SIA project is the result of a long-term partnership between her students and the nursing home residents from Worcester’s St. Mary Health Care Center. Their SIA project will utilize a mixed method approach to explore the benefits of intergenerational learning between college-aged students (from Holy Cross) and nursing home residents and staff (from St. Mary Health Care Center) using the improvisational storytelling method TimeSlips™. The goals of this project are manifold– include exposing students to intergenerational conversations, and, ultimately, breaking down ageist and ableist assumptions they may hold and engaging our community members living and working in institutional care settings, where both residents’ quality of life and staff work satisfaction has been demonstrated to improve during arts-based interventions and programming.
Below is a video of the work that Professor Renée Beard, her student Kit Meszaros '24, and St. Mary's Health Care Center has been doing together to explore intergenerational learning between college students and nursing home residents using reflections from TimeSlips™ .