May 2024 Community of Interest Highlights

The Aging in Community Education & Research (ACER) Community is becoming a meaningful way to bring internal and external representatives together and is sowing seeds for potential mutually beneficial collaborations/partnerships.

Community of Interest (CI) takes place on the 3rd Thursday of every month. Please click here to join the email list and to stay informed.

As in previous Community of Interest conversations, participation in May reflects a nice mix of Humber College representatives (staff and faculty) and external Humber participants.

A highlight of our recent conversation held on 16th May 2024 was:

• Welcoming Alexander (Alex) Shvarts, Sociology professor, to tell us about an assignment he introduced in his Sociology of Health course this past term. The assignment was based on ACER themes and demonstrates a wonderful example of embedding 'age' related assignments into the curriculum and, specifically, ACER-related assignments.

• Alex walked us through the details of the assignment and shared examples of student PowerPoint presentations that formed part of grading for the assignment. The PowerPoint presentations are posted here with permission from the students.

• Beyond his course, Alex talked about how other Humber faculty could adapt an assignment such as his in their courses.

• We had a good discussion about the impact of an assignment such as this one on students and Ray Applebaum, CEO. Peel Senior Link pointed out the broader impact on the healthcare system of engaging students in this type of assignment.