It’s not every day that grandparents come back to study at the university.
But this summer, more than 1,300 grandparents and grandchildren come to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to immerse themselves in the campus experience through Grandparents University.
Sponsored by the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Grandparents University is an award-winning two-day program that invites grandparents and grandchildren ages 7-14 to experience campus together. They pick majors, attend class, live in the dorms and eat at Gordon Commons.
Participants can take a variety of courses including many in the liberal arts – taught by College of Letters & Science faculty – such as courses from astronomy to cartography and evolutionary biology to limnology.
(Sarah Morton, L&S)
“It’s a great way to spend a college experience with the grandchildren,” says James Jefferies, who majored in Italian Studies with his grandson Zachary Johnson. “It gets him thinking college.”
“I think that if you show kids from a very young age that the university is for them, that this is a resource and a place where they can feel safe and have fun and learn about so many different parts of the world outside of their normal community, then … it’s going to be so much more obvious to them that they should pursue a higher education,” says Aria Cabot, a graduate student in the Department of French and Italian and the instructor of the Italian Studies major.
This summer, the Italian Studies course focuses on Italian culture and language. Students learn Italian vocabulary while studying Italian and American non-verbal communication customs.
“One of the most important things to me is that they feel like if they went to Italy today, they could start to recognize things that they wouldn't normally pick up on,” says Cabot. “Just creating a more heightened awareness of these things, like visual cues, that can be really helpful in a foreign culture.”
Students also discuss Italian food culture and gain hands-on experience making a tasty Italian treat: the cannoli.
In another course – Geology & Evolution – students learn through hands-on activities by creating dinosaur puppets and participating in a scavenger hunt in the UW-Madison Geology Museum.
“I love teaching the students about what is and is not a dinosaur … and knowing that they will never go back to those misconceptions,” says Deborah Rook, a Morgridge Distinguished Graduate Fellow and the Geology & Evolution major instructor.
Participants in the Social Robotics major explore the development of social robots for use in everyday life.
“I like learning something together, because I didn't know anything about social robotics and it’s so interesting,” says Norma Satter (MS’86), who majored in Social Robotics with her grandson, Pablo Jefferies. “Together we are learning something new. I think it’s a wonderful program.”
Families do not need to have a UW-Madison connection to attend. For more information on Grandparents University, visit http://www.uwalumni.com/grandparents.