cross-generational learning community on the campus by developing programs and policies designed to serve mature adults in the regular academic program. As a result, students above the age of 25 number one in four of Huron College students. In addition, the learning center has furnished a number of noncredit learning experiences, involving a cumulative total of over 300 senior citizens in short, noncredit courses in the past 8 months.

Under the codirection of Dr. Keith Orr and Dr. David Nichols, the center is developing a comprehensive plan for community education for Huron and the region. The community learning center's 5-year plan calls for a reorientation of all college personnel, programs and policies to serve lifelong learning needs. This program is an unprecedented attempt to make the entire institution into a community learning center, a source of lifelong educational renewal for the Huron community and the region it serves. If successful, the Huron College program will become a model program for post-secondary education in the learning society. The KARE program is therefore the centerpiece of a larger comprehensive community education program.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES OF THE KARE PROGRAM

(1) To encourage constructive attitudes toward and knowledge of the life cycle among all age groups in the college community.

(2) To eliminate agism in college social and intellectual life.

(3) To serve the special educational needs (both basic survival needs and enrichment needs) of older persons.

(4) To utilize older persons as resources for learning and counseling, cultivating the intellectual circle of young and old.

(5) To foster surrogate extended family relationships among young and old. (6) To reorient college personnel, policies, and programs to the needs of older persons.

(7) To redesign disciplinary and professional fields of study to include aging components and educational methods utilizing older persons as resource persons. (8) To assist younger students in acquiring cross-generational competencies for effective service in the learning society of the future.

(9) To provide counseling to meet cross-generational needs in planning first careers, second careers, and retirement.

(10) To utilize the young-old educational framework as the grounding for servicing the lifelong learning needs of older age groups between youth and the aged.

(11) To establish a living laboratory for social and educational gerontology to benefit preprofessionals and professionals.

(12) To demonstrate the utility of redefining the liberal arts to include an exposure to a variety of persons and age groups.

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1. Laboratory for Social and Educational Gerontology
2. Model for small colleges in the learning society
3. Cross-generational redefinition of liberal arts

WHAT WE INTEND TO DO: COMPONENTS OF THE KARE PROJECT

Component No. 1: Educational Services to Older Persons

(1) What Huron is already doing-The DARE program of noncredit courses.— In 1975, the community learning center received title I funding in the amount of $19,099 for a program entitled, "Liberal Arts for Older Americans." The premise of this program was that many educational programs aimed at senior citizens either focused them into educational molds conceived for young persons or provided segregated, paternalistic, and trivial learning experience designed by younger persons and based on myths concerning the learning capacities and interests of older persons.

The "DARE" program (developing adult resources through education), as it was eventually renamed, is predicated on the idea that older persons can and do value learning in traditional liberal arts disciplines, provided those disciplines and teaching methods are adapted to their special needs. The DARE program has become, therefore, a vehicle for faculty members to adapt their disciplines' content and methods to senior needs.

This program has been popular and successful. As it has developed, the advisory committee has moved to integrate learning experiences designed to meet basic needs (consumer education, defensive driving, estate planning, etc.) with the liberal arts offerings, an integrated delivery system for educational services. This integrated system was recognized with a second title I grant of $24,934 in January 1976 (funds to be released during fiscal 1977).

A major purpose of the DARE program has been to, where possible, encourage cross-generational learning activities. A sociology of leisure class (summer 1975) was successful in involving persons with an age range of 19 to 80. Most recently, a January term course, “Myths of Aging," involved younger students at the College in a balanced program of study and field experience and crossgenerational social activities with members of the Huron Area Senior Center. This class was one of the most successful January term courses in the recent history of the college. It demonstrated the utility of the integrative principle that underlies the proposal to establish a "live-n-learn" senior center on campus as part of a cross-generational learning community.

A cumulative total of more than 300 older persons have been involved in the DARE program and its auxiliary activities. To this point, however, these programs have taken place mostly at the current senior center (which is located some distance from the campus) and have been only peripherally integrated with regular college study. It highlights Huron College's successful track record in educating older persons, and it demonstrates our capacity for implementing the more comprehensive KARE project.

(2) What Huron College seeks to do: The regular academic program.-Where most colleges have failed, Huron hopes to succeed in integrating older persons into the degree-granting curriculum. The following constitute important factors in this program:

(a) The orientation of staff and faculty to serve older adults;

(b) A credit for life experience program;

(c) Tuition subsidies;

(d) An affirmative action program to guarantee older persons equal access to all financial aids; and

(e) A developmental skills program to assist older persons in adjusting to college-level academic work.

The orientation of staff and faculty will be covered more thoroughly below, but it is essential to integrating older persons into course work. The redefinition of liberal arts described above will assist in this because it treats older persons not merely as students but as resource persons.

The credit for life experience program is already in operation at Huron College, but there has been insufficient personnel time available to go through the process of applying it to senior citizens. The college needs additional funds to hire personnel to accredit experiential learning properly.

Huron College has taken steps to open all financial aids to adult students and some younger adults have taken advantage of this program. However, older Americans need special attention and help in putting together Federal family financial need statements necessary to receive basic opportunity grants, workstudy funds, low-interest loans, and other aids.

These aids will not be sufficient for some older persons on low incomes. Huron College currently charges $99 per unit (40 percent of the regular tuition) for credit and $25 for audit (50 percent of the regular fee) for senior citizens. As a small private college, Huron cannot afford to cut these fees further and needs tuition subsidies to help provide educational services to older persons.

Finally, one of the great concerns for older persons entering college work centers on their study skills. A major objective will be to validate the McGrawHill basic skills, writing, reading, and vocabulary tests, and the Brown-Carlsen listening comprehension test with older persons and adapt them to their needs. At the same time, in line with the cross-generational emphasis, the Huron College study skills clinic will attempt to utilize older persons as developmental skills assistants in working with younger students needing assistance.

Component No. 2: Older Americans as Educational Resources

Fundamental to the KARE program is the idea that utilizing older persons as educational resource persons enriches both the learning of younger students and provides the foundation for comfortable entry of seniors into degree-granting college programs. Older persons have experience, wisdom and perspective to bring to learning experiences which they can profit from the fresh ideas of younger persons.

Huron College seeks to systematically utilize the elder educational resources that will be so readily available due to the establishment of the senior center adjacent to the campus. Specifically, Huron will seek to :

(1) Orient faculty to the valuable resource in older American experience; (2) Develop classroom methods to effectively utilize older persons who enroll in the academic program;

(3) Establish a program of paid guest-resource persons drawn from the senior population;

(4) Develop a program utilizing the professional experience of retired persons in career counseling (see the life/career counseling component below);

(5) Identify, utilize, and preserve the contributions to knowledge that can be obtained from older adult experiential learning (e.g., oral history, etc.); and

(6) Utilize the child care competencies of older persons in a child care program integrated with educational programs and serving younger single parents-students with child care needs.

1Component No. 3: A Life/Career Counseling Center

South Dakota has no sophisticated career counseling center for any age group in the State. Persons can expect to change vocations as many as five times prior to retirement. Huron College proposes to meet the need by establishing a unique cross-generational counseling center. A feature of this center will be the utilization of retired professionals as career consultants. At the same time, an effort will be made to provide second career counseling (or beyond second careers) and preretirement counseling.

The counseling center will be predicated on a recognition of the inevitability of career changes. It will assist persons all along the age spectrum in achieving positive perceptions of the life cycle and avoid the "on the shelf" syndrome for older persons.

Younger students (including mature adults planning a second career) will go through the following steps:

(1) Interview with a career counseling clinician;

(2) Take interest and personality tests;

(3) Have test battery results evaluated by the clinician;

(4) Interview with a retired professional career counselor (an older person experienced in law, business, medicine, etc.) ;

(5) Have a composite evaluation prepared by the clinician and the retired person; and

(6) Have a conference for sharing evaluation results.

The older person-consultant will be involved in steps four and five. These persons will be hired on a consultant basis.

In counseling older persons, a major concern of the center will be appropriatetesting procedures. At present, no comprehensive set of tests are available that are appropriate to the needs of older persons.

The Huron College Counseling Center, under the leadership of Dr. Tyra Talley, will attempt to validate instruments and establish fresh norms to assist older persons. The following instruments will be utilized:

(1) The Minnesota Mutiphasic Personality Inventory;

(2) Dr. Grace Kent's Emergency "D" scale to assist in sorting out persons not suited to academic work and identify different interests;

(3) The general aptitude test battery to establish criteria for over-all expectations; and

(4) The Strong vocational inventory test (would be useful in identifying areas of critical interest for alert and aggressive older persons).

The counseling center staff will attempt. (in cooperation with the developmental skills program utilizing the McGraw-Hill study skills tests) to adapt these instruments to the needs of older persons and provide a model career and retirement counseling program for the region.

Component No. 4: Institutional Adaptation to the Cross-Generational Learning Community

(1) Orienting personnel: Huron College seeks to orient all personnel (both teaching and nonteaching) to the needs, value, and roles of older persons who will be connected with the senior center on campus. All other plans cannot be operationalized without adequate orientation of staff. To this end, Huron College

will:

(a) Hold not less than four staff workshops on aging and the needs of older persons during 1976–77;

(b) Employ consultants to meet with every administrative and academic unit in the college to assist in adapting policies and programs to the new situation; and

(c) Involve faculty in planning (both released time, summer and January term) for the adaptation of their subject areas to the needs of a cross-generational student clientele.

Fundamental to this reorientation process will be strict requirements that staff provide visible evidence (in the form of written plans, active performance, course plans, etc.) that they have, in fact, adapted and internalized new knowledge concerning older persons and the aging process.

(2) Adaptation of the curriculum.-Related to the orientation of teaching staff will be a process for implementing the study of aging in the curriculum. This will be done through :

(a) Specialized social and educational gerontology courses;

(b) Design of gerontology modules for utilization in existing disciplines; and

(c) Design of workshops and noncredit offering that can be provided both on and off campus.

The college will seek consultant assistance in this program and is negotiating with the University of Michigan Gerontology Institute concerning a possible consultant relationship with that institute. Dr. Howard C. McCulsky has already consulted with Huron College personnel and will be visiting the campus later this spring in that capacity.

In this program of curricular adaptation, Huron College hopes to provide a model for other small private colleges. We anticipate that no discipline or professional field will be left untouched by an aging factor. Specific examples may include:

(a) History: An increased emphasis on preserving the oral history of the region and the eye-witness accounts of 20th century events that can only be provided by the persons who lived through them.

(b) Sociology: An emphasis on personification of the life cycle, drawing on the expertise of older persons in family matters, career and retirement problems, etc.

(c) Psychology: An increased emphasis on longitudinal studies of human behavior and the impact of aging on human psychology and intelligence. (d) Physical education: A move away from sports emphasis to increased focus on recreation and lifelong physical fitness, with personification of particular problems and field experience for recreation directors of the future. (e) Music: Adaptation of music education methods to the needs of older persons. In the DARE program, one Huron College professor already has adapted the famous Carl Orff music education method to senior citizens on