the Informer

For the first time in University of Hartford history, freshman students are able to connect their experiences with their first year of college to those who are also sharing their first-year experiences in the Duncaster Retirement and Assistant Living Care Community.

Duncaster Retirement Community, located in Bloomfield, is a place that seniors may move into as a plain townhouse, or for the assisted care. Fortunately, the assisted care is open to all people living in the community, but mainly encompasses the elderly that are in need of health care. Duncaster’s homes are open to any senior citizen and are conveniently located near any necessity stores for easy access.

This project connects 14 freshmen in their First Year Seminar to travel off campus and meet senior citizens that have recently moved into the senior citizen community homes and are facing a new life-changing experience as well. Although the project is new as of this year, Teresa Stores, the founder of this project, is for certain that the end result will benefit each student and senior citizen. Stores is currently a creative writing professor at the University and she has been in the School of Arts and Sciences for a number of years.

The overall idea arose with Stores’ simply pondering of how she could create an oral project to somehow connect students with older generations. Stores mentioned how with the “ever-changing lives we live in, young people rarely interact with older people, unless it’s their grandparents.”

As her ideas progressed, Stores brought up the oral project with the president of the University’s President College, Humphrey Tonkin, to discuss what possibilities could come of the project. With a long discussion over lunch in December, Tonkin, Stores and Duncaster’s Director of Resident Services, Janet Lamenzo, came to a conclusion that this project should be a part of the University’s curriculum as a First-Year Seminar.

The FYS course named “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes,” holds 14 different individuals. Their overall task is to communicate, directly, to a senior citizen with a partner. They must get to know their back story and why they moved into the Duncaster homes, as well as what their personality is like.

The citizens are overjoyed to be with the young children again, notes Stores, “It really brings them to life because it’s not the most exciting thing in the world to know that you’re old and should move into a ‘dorm-like’ situation, living with other people. That’s why I wanted to do this project; I wanted the freshmen to know that they aren’t the only ones leaving behind their whole lives.”

After a six week intensive, the students learned how to use the equipment, then for the remaining ten weeks, they record and compose a journal about the lives of their citizen. The students are required to create a five to ten minute documentary with their partner of information they learned about their citizen, along with a five to ten page paper that they make individually to record the journals about their citizen and what they got from the overall participation in the project.

With the help of Dana Eckstein, a junior double majoring in Creative Writing and Cinema, helped make this project possible. She currently helps Stores as her preceptor, and also suggested the Cinema department to give a loan for cameras to record for this project.

WELFUND gave a grant to Stores for her project, giving her enough money to purchase all recording materials necessary for this trip, including transportation access when the class takes place on Wednesdays. The whole experience has given the students a positive outlook on living in a new setting and feeling lost without their usual routine.

Freshman Marina Peridos said, “I love the class and interacting outside the classroom. It’s been quite an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Stores is overjoyed with the progress the students have made and how much they have changed their perspectives about seniors from the beginning of the year. She notes how this “project is so significant in the students’ lives. They will never forget this experience.”

Six months after this project, Stores plans to re-evaluate the students and interview them on their thoughts on the projects. In the next year or so, Stores, along with her preceptor Eckstein, Lamenzo and other writing sources, plan to create a documentary that incorporates all of the students’ videos and interviews with the citizens.

This project is sure to leave both the freshmen and the citizens knowing that they aren’t the only ones going through a new phase in their life; there is always someone out there to relate to.