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| navigate: home: magazine: winter 1999: article | |
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Nutrition expert makes life better for children and adults By Deborah A. Benedetti | ||||||||
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The landscape of education is undergoing a revolution. The availability and accessibility of CD-ROM hardware and software, the Internet, satellite broadcasting and compressed video is changing the way we exchange knowledge. We have the challenge to learn how to harness this explosion of technology for use in the education environment. Many questions remain to be explored, including how to optimize the effectiveness of this technology for a variety of audiences, particularly those who have been dropped from the technology pipeline in the past, such as females, minorities, older adults and the inner-city poor. In her work at Penn State, Dr. Claudia K. Probart has explored a variety of innovative delivery systems for nutrition education. An associate professor of nutrition in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State, she is very familiar with communicating nutrition information to children and adults. Before embarking on an academic research career, she spent 10 years working in the public health field as a director of dietetics for hospitals, a nutrition consultant for the Head Start Program and a YMCA, and a nutritionist program manager for the Women, Infant and Children’s (WIC) Nutrition Program. “I love working with people one-on-one,” she said. “It’s the most rewarding and wonderful thing I’ve ever done, but it’s a slow way to communicate nutrition information. That’s why I went back for my Ph.D. I knew I wasn’t reaching enough people with my one-on-one approach, and I realized that what I needed to learn was how to better communicate and market knowledge to a wider audience.” She now focuses her research efforts on discovering cost-effective mass education processes for delivering nutrition information. Her goal is “to pay back and help others who haven’t had the opportunities to go back to school. To me, this is almost a sacred trust—to learn things and give back to my community. I’m very fortunate that I’m able to incorporate my personal goal of helping people into my research at Penn State.” One way she is giving back to the community is through her nutrition research projects, all of which are designed to extend knowledge to people and improve the quality of their lives, especially marginalized groups. Since joining the College of Health and Human Development in 1992, Probart has received nearly $2 million in research funding from federal and state governments, foundations and corporations. “I can’t think of anything I’ve done that hasn’t had an outreach component, either direct or indirect,” said Probart, who is a registered and licensed dietitian. Her research also benefits the students she teaches and the students who are members of her research team. One of her major research projects, Project PA, is aimed at making school lunches an enjoyable and healthful experience for students. She is helping Pennsylvania school food service directors incorporate new federal guidelines for school lunches. The School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children calls for lowering fat in foods and making meals more nutritious. School food service directors must do this while facing economic constraints and children’s preferences for high-fat and sugary foods. With funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, Probart is using a variety of education methods and information technologies to reach thousands of school food service directors in Pennsylvania. She conducted satellite teleconferences in 1996 and 1997 with assistance from Penn State Public Broadcasting staff, and she has created videotapes and designed hands-on computer training classes for this group. To reach even more schools, she is enlisting the help of school food service directors to serve as “master instructors.” These instructors will receive special training and will share their knowledge with other school food service personnel. Her latest contribution to Project PA is a video documentary highlighting successful practices and processes that schools are using to incorporate the federal guidelines. She hopes the video documentary will become a model for schools nationwide that need to make similar changes in their food service programs. Barbara E. Martin, chief of the School Programs Section, Food and Nutrition Service, Mid-Atlantic Region, for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, praised Probart’s efforts to help school food service directors implement the federal guidelines: “The regulations and new procedures are designed to bring all school meals served into compliance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. There was however a great deal of fear and apprehension among the people who needed to prepare and serve the meals about the changes being required. … Without Claudia’s guiding efforts and her development of the creative team, there would not have been such accuracy of presentation and relevance of issues in the final training. The videos and training developed with Project Pennsylvania have relevance and should provide guidance well beyond Pennsylvania’s borders. Efforts to improve school meals contribute to the health, behavior and readiness to learn of the Commonwealth’s and the nation’s children. Claudia’s outreach efforts have contributed significantly to our national goals.” Patricia Birkenshaw agrees with this assessment of Probart’s outreach initiatives. Birkenshaw is state director for Child Nutrition Programs, Division of Food and Nutrition, Bureau of Budget and Fiscal Management, for the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Pennsylvania serves school lunches to 1 million children daily. To make the mandated changes, 3,000 school food service staff would need to be trained. “Dr. Probart became our mentor, adviser, strategic planner and implementer,” Birkenshaw said. “With her direction, expertise and rare insight into the populations to be served, Project PA arrived. This multiyear multifaceted training and educational initiative has become the envy of other states attempting to respond to new nutrition mandates. Training strategies and related materials developed by Dr. Probart are in demand throughout the country.” Probart said she is proud to work with school food service directors. When she was an elementary school student, she and her parents traveled the valleys and desserts of California, while her father worked in food canneries and as a construction worker. She eagerly looked forward to eating lunch at school. It’s where she had her first bite of pizza, and often, a school lunch was her only hot meal of the day. “We moved around a lot when I was a child,” she explained. “I went to at least 30 different schools in California. It was a wonderful experience in teaching me to be resilient.” A turning point came during a health class, when she was assigned to do a term report on nutrition. “I got so excited about the power of what we eat that nutrition became my hobby,” she said. “I read everything I could about it.” As an adult, she earned an associate degree from East Los Angeles College by attending classes at night and working two jobs during the day. She later earned bachelor and master of science degrees in nutrition from Utah State University, where she also was awarded one of the nation’s first public health fellowships. Then she spent 10 years working in the public health field before earning a doctoral degree from the University of Oregon in Eugene. At Penn State, Probart is continuing to focus her research and outreach on nutrition. A second research project involves developing a nutrition curriculum for middle school students and training teachers to use the curriculum in their classrooms. She organizes summer workshops for teachers and delivers the workshops via an interactive compressed video system that enables her to communicate in real time with participants at multiple sites in Pennsylvania. Another key component of her research involves educational programs for middle school children. She and her research team have created two interactive computer programs: A Drop of Water, an environmental health and water pollution program funded by the National Institutes of Health, and Students Serving it Safe, a program on food safety issues funded partially by the American School Food Service Foundation. “We chose computers to reach children with this educational programming, because right now children are excited about computers, so it makes sense to take advantage of this technology,” she said. Both programs are available on CD-ROM. Last November, Probart visited the middle school she attended in East Los Angeles, Calif., for a field test of A Drop of Water. This school has one of the highest populations of new immigrant students from Mexico, she noted. “The field test was immensely successful, and I found it personally satisfying to help the students at the school I once attended,” she said. “One key to the success of A Drop of Water is that the computer program will patiently go over and over things. Everything that’s written in A Drop of Water is also spoken in the computer program. It wasn’t my intention to use this program to teach English, but it has real potential to help students for whom English is a second language.” A fourth project has evolved into an annual conference on eating disorders. Probart is the faculty chairperson for the conference and a member of the planning team, which includes staff from Outreach and Cooperative Extension’s Continuing Education and Conferences and Institutes units. “There were already several well-known conferences in this field,” she said. “For Penn State to be successful in creating a conference on eating disorders, we needed to focus on an area that wasn’t being covered. We chose to create a conference on the institutional response to eating disorders. Our strategy has paid off, and our fourth successful conference was held at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel last summer.” For all of her research projects, she asks herself and her team members one question: “Is what we’re doing relevant and compelling?” She said, “This is my mantra. I know that I am competing for people’s time, so my educational programs have to have a balance of entertainment and education to be successful.” Probart is succeeding in achieving this goal, thanks to her ability to attract research funding. “I’m using my research results to further the field of nutrition, as well as help people. My personal goal meshes very well with Penn State’s emphasis on outreach.” |
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Did you know... College of Health and Human Development* Number of outreach programs delivered in 1997–98: 161 Number of participants served in 1997–98: 22,229 External outreach partners:
Organizations—
Professional organizations—
Government— * College of Health and Human Development Strategic Planning Update |
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