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| navigate: home: magazine: spring 2001: article | |
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Outreach Partnership Fund Supports increase in community services through partnerships By Celena E. Kusch | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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When asked how she became involved in her recent outreach work, Dr. Bonnie J.F. Meyer, professor of educational psychology, made it seem simple enough. She had developed a program for increasing reading comprehension and retention in aging adults, and she was interested in applying that knowledge. During a Children, Youth and Families Consortium conference on intergenerational relationships and programming, Meyer met Dr. Wendy Middlemiss, and an outreach partnership was not far behind. Middlemiss, assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Shenango; Janet McDougall, county extension director for Mercer County; and Dr. Dan Lago, then an extension specialist in agricultural and extension education, began work with Meyer to develop and implement an intergenerational tutoring program. The program uses the Internet to link seniors trained in reading comprehension strategies with elementary students who would not otherwise have access to such skilled tutors, Meyer explained. This Intergenerational Internet Tutoring for Reading Comprehension program is just one of 15 innovative outreach projects funded by the Outreach Partnership Fund last year. The fund, established with contributions from Penn State Cooperative Extension, Continuing Education and Distance Education, provides seed funding for collaborative outreach program development and delivery. In the tutoring program, the fund supported an eight-session, on-campus Continuing Education program for training local elders — many of them retired professors and teachers — to become on-line tutors. The fund also supported the initial development of on-line lessons for children based on Meyer’s reading comprehension strategies for seniors. Following the tutor training sessions, faculty partners arranged tutoring connections and continued on-line lesson development with the support of a grant from the Children, Youth and Families Consortium. Since then, 11 volunteer tutors have had on-line, instructional interactions with 26 children from Mercer County. Overall, tutors positively evaluated the three months they spent tutoring children via the Internet. Most volunteered to tutor other children in the future. In focus groups held after the tutoring, some tutors explained that they had increased their memory for what they read and their computer skills. Some tutors stated that the tutoring project was a good way to help children while at the same time keeping themselves mentally alert. Formal analyses of gains in performance for the tutors are currently in progress. The ongoing evaluation shows preliminary signs of similar growth in these areas for the children, as well. According to Middlemiss, forming the partnership contributed greatly to the project’s success. “Particularly when we were setting up the program, the partnership was very valuable. Together, we all had much more knowledge and many more resources than we would have had individually,” she said. “When you are doing applied research, you can spend weeks on the phone just trying to make the connections. In our case, though, Janet [McDougall] knows this community, and she knows the schools. She could tell us exactly who to call and which offices to contact for permissions. The partnership with her was invaluable in terms of getting started,” Middlemiss continued. Middlemiss and Meyer also have plans to expand the program through external funding. In the future, the program may include tutors recruited from nursing homes and real-time on-line chats between students and tutors. Dr. Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director of the Division of Continuing Education, commented on the value of collaborations like that of the tutoring program. “The Outreach Partnership Fund is based on the idea that supporting partnerships within the University will strengthen our ability to serve individuals and organizations within our communities. The Intergenerational Internet Tutoring program is an excellent example of the great impact such partnerships can make through ongoing and ever-expanding programs,” she said. The Outreach Partnership Fund provides a one-time-only grant of between $2,000 and $4,000 to support collaborative needs assessment, program development and program delivery projects among Penn State Outreach and Cooperative Extension units, including Continuing Education, Cooperative Extension, Distance Education, Public Broadcasting and campus college Continuing Education offices. More than $105,000 has been committed to support 27 proposals statewide since the fund’s inception two years ago. (See box at left for a list of programs funded in 2000.) The funded projects further Outreach and Cooperative Extension goals to expand program audiences, provide new programs and address newly identified community needs. The Outreach Partnership Fund supports programming in a variety of formats, including conferences, specialized institutes, educational modules, courses developed on site or using technology, certificate programs, informal education and many other formats. Dr. Theodore R. Alter, associate vice president for outreach, director of Cooperative Extension and associate dean, College of Agricultural Sciences, noted, “Experience shows that people have good ideas in mind. Sometimes all that is needed is just a little support to bring the right people together to put wheels on those ideas. The Outreach Partnership Fund, by providing small amounts of funding, does just that and has resulted in many new and effective partnerships that serve the needs of our customers over time.” One of the most innovative formats for a funded program has been the Appreciating and Valuing Diversity in the 21st Century Essay Contest for middle and high school students in Centre, Clinton and Clearfield counties. The program represents a collaboration between Dr. Patreese Ingram, assistant professor of agricultural and extension education and winner of the 2001 National Annual Award for Diversity; Patty Satalia, producer at Penn State Public Broadcasting’s WPSX-TV; and Pennsylvania public school’s Intermediate Unit 10. In the two years since the fund was established, outreach partnerships have led to many important outcomes statewide. In addition to supporting the intergenerational tutoring program, this funding has facilitated a pilot food safety training partnership that has blossomed into a statewide collaborative program. Several hands-on information technology and science and career camps for youth have been offered at county and campus locations. An agricultural education and career program is developing in Mercer County, and a Forest Resources Institute for Teachers has been delivered in Warren and Dauphin counties. Several shared staff positions have also been established with initial support from the Outreach Partnership Fund. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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