Cooking for Computers: New Education Program Encourages Exchange Between Students and Staff

Darla Attardi '06 is back on campus — but instead of paying tuition, she's drawing a paycheck, as coordinator of staff education. Her position, a new one at Bryn Mawr, grew out of relationships and skills she developed in her former role as a student. But Attardi might object to the word "former." Having earned a Pennsylvania teaching certification through the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Education Program after serving as a student teacher at Philadelphia's J.R. Masterman School, she plans a career as an educator. That, to her mind, also means embracing the student role for life.

Attardi's new position in Information Services is an integral part of Bryn Mawr's Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI), whose premise is that all participants in a learning situation are both teachers and learners (see related story). Several of the initiative's programs, including those Attardi oversees, focus on integrating members of the College's staff more thoroughly into the College's educational mission and encouraging educational exchange between students and staff members.

When Chief Information Officer and Professor of History Elliott Shore and Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Berenson began talking about staff education with Associate Professor of Education Alison Cook-Sather, then the director of Bryn Mawr-Haverford Education Program, the group envisioned an effort that would go beyond training office workers in technologies they needed to do their jobs.

"They wanted to encourage lifelong learning and personal development in general," Attardi says.

An Introduction to the Internet

One of the goals the group identified was familiarizing staff members whose work doesn't require computer skills with the Internet. "Employees of Bryn Mawr College have access to a wealth of resources, including technological resources," says Cook-Sather. "But many of them aren't comfortable enough with the technologies to take advantage of them." Developing staff members' Internet skills also benefits the College, Cook-Sather explains, by making it easier to communicate with its employees.

Faculty, staff, administrators and students worked together to design a course titled "Using E-Mail and the Internet" that was offered first to staff members in the Dining Services and Housekeeping departments. Education students serve as mentors for staff members. The class meets once per week during the academic year and twice per week during the summer; students and staff meet for an additional hour per week for one-on-one mentoring. Staff are given paid release time for this class. Shore taught the first class last spring. Heather Curl (Haverford '03) taught it last summer; Attardi has taken it on for the academic year.

Learning Groups for Advanced Use of Technology

Another program, developed by Attardi early last summer, encourages staff members to coach each other in using work-related technologies. "Advanced Uses of Technology" was launched with a workshop in Microsoft Excel, the leading spreadsheet software. Attardi organized about 25 participants into learning groups whose members represented a range of skill levels in the technology. Each member of the group came to the workshop with a specific project. Attardi met beforehand with the most advanced users to discuss teaching methods, including "discovery-based learning."

In discovery-based learning, Attardi explains, the teacher "asks questions that help lead the student to figure out for herself how to accomplish a task. People are much more likely to retain skills they have learned this way than they are if they watch a demonstration and take notes."

Student-Staff Partnerships

A third program, titled the Empowering Learners Partnership Program, establishes reciprocal teaching relationships between students and staff members. In a pilot of the program last spring, ELP paired staff members with Bryn Mawr students who exchanged instruction in skills such as reading and vocabulary building, computer literacy, and research for training in cooking, wood carving, self-defense and crafts. The program was developed in a Bryn Mawr-Haverford education course offered by Senior Lecturer in Education Alice Lesnick, who now directs the Bi-College education progam.

"The class served as sort of a think tank for the program," Lesnick explains.

She quickly recognized the program-development expertise of one of her students, McBride scholar Amanda Root '08. At 19, with a GED in hand, Root founded the Railroad Street Youth Project, a nonprofit youth-empowerment organization in Great Barrington, Mass., in response to the growing substance-abuse problem to which she had lost several friends.

"Amanda's story was especially persuasive to staff members," Lesnick said. "She was telling them that she had a GED and now here she is studying at Bryn Mawr."

Root, who plans to declare a major in political science and a minor in education, agreed to serve as the student co-coordinator of the project.

"We put together round-table discussions in which people who are differently positioned in the College community — staff members, students and faculty — and discussed what 'empowering learners' meant. The ELP mission statement was developed from the language that came out of those discussions."

The pilot program itself started mid-semester, and responses from participants were quite positive.

"Knowing that you are teaching somebody something valuable while you are learning from them makes you feel good," says Arthur Taylor, a 23-year veteran of Bryn Mawr Dining Services who participated in the program last spring. "It's a great experience."

Taylor is well known on campus for his woodworking skills; each February he displays a decorated cabinet incised with a history of the Civil Rights Movement in Haffner Dining Hall to celebrate Black History Month. He is also an experienced practitioner of martial arts such as karate and kick-boxing. In exchange for computer instruction, Taylor taught a student decorative carving and gave her some pointers about how to defend herself against an attacker.

Taylor says he had never taught before, but found the experience valuable. "Teaching is challenging," he says. "But being able to help a student learn a new skill that she can use all her life is a wonderful thing."

Education student Maeve O'Hara '08 agrees. "One of my favorite things (and the reason I want to teach) is sharing a learning experience with someone and growing in knowledge and passion together ... Having to take a step back and break down those skills which I never formally learned, but acquired through years was a real challenge.  I love what a supportive community of learners we became."

This year the program has expanded. Ten staff members have registered to participate in the Empowering Learners Partnership Program. The staff members were paired with students this week and will work out their teaching and learning plans next week, Root says. Areas of expertise that have been offered include Italian language instruction, reading the Koran, cooking, computer skills, crafts and car maintenance.

A new development is a service-learning component of the program, suggested and overseen by Training and Program Coordinator Ellie Esmond of the Civic Engagement Office. Four student-staff pairs will do volunteer work through the Greater Philadelphia Cares, which matches volunteers with nonprofit organizations. The teams will also research the organizations they work for and give presentations at the class's final meeting.

Lesnick says that she is excited about the degree of institutional support for the program. "Staff members are eligible for paid release time for both Empowering Learners and for 'Using E-Mail and the Internet,'" she says, "and students can participate as part of a Praxis course or as a work-study job," she says, "so that's a significant commitment on the part of the College."

Berenson explains: "There are many reasons for the College to support this program, but the most important one might be that it is a great way for staff, students and faculty to work and learn together. The College community will be strengthened by all activities in which faculty, staff and students are all participants."

Shore, who taught the first of the staff classes on e-mail and the Internet in the spring, says, "this initiative starts to make fuller use of all of the investment the College has made in information-technology infrastructure and staff."  He hopes it will lead to "a learning community in which all of us, faculty, students and staff, learn from and teach one another." The classes with Dining Services and Housekeeping staff, he said, were "among the most rewarding experiences in my 30 years in the classroom."

So far, the Empowering Learners Partnership Program has been offered to employees of Dining Services and Housekeeping; Lesnick hopes to broaden the program to other departments next semester. For more information about Empowering Learners, contact Lesnick at x7944 or e-mail her at alesnick@brynmawr.edu; for more information about Using E-Mail or Advanced Uses of Technology, contact Attardi at x5284 or e-mail her at dattardi@brynmawr.edu.

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