Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
50 Years of Curiosity, Conversation and Education
Paula Ninerell has a personal definition of what it means to be a lifelong learner.
“I think the most important aspect would be curiosity. You can go day-to-day living and just walk by a certain park seeing a certain tree that might have a marking on it, and you walk right by it,” she said. “Instead, maybe you stop to look at the marking and learn what kind of tree it is and maybe you take it further and do a little more research on that tree. I think lifelong learning comes down to what you do with your curiosity.”
Ninerell is certainly not one to simply walk through life. It’s the reason she began her association with Temple’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) back in 1984 when it was still called the Temple Association of Retired Professionals.
“It was at a time in my life when I was feeling at loose ends. I didn’t really fit in suburbia and wasn’t quite familiar with Philadelphia yet, but I had read about this program — I would come to classes and experience such wonderful things,’ said Ninerell, 81. “We’d learn about the background and history of a play and then tour the stage of the Academy of Music. We’d have a cocktail party on the top of the Drake Hotel. Here was an opportunity to meet new people and learn new things — I said to myself, ‘I’m going to keep doing this!’”
Paula Ninerell
Paula Ninerell
This year, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is celebrating 50 years of providing accessible, high-quality, non-credit education to adults aged 50 and older.
Founded in 1975 as the Association of Retired Professionals with just 85 members and 34 courses, OLLI has since grown into a vibrant community of more than 1,000 members annually.
Today, OLLI offers 70 to 80 courses each fall and spring — and more than 30 courses during the summer across a wide diversity of disciplines such as literature, history, science, current events and the arts.
A 2007 grant from the Bernard Osher Foundation welcomed Temple into a national network of 125 Osher institutes, further establishing its leadership in lifelong learning.
“Temple’s lifelong learning program was one of the first of its kind. It started at Temple’s Center City Campus, which was then located at 1616 Walnut Street, when a group of older adults in Philadelphia approached Temple about developing a program that focused on lifelong educational opportunities.”
The goal at the time, Brunner said, “was to provide ongoing education for older individuals, most of whom were retired."
“We’ve certainly expanded that goal over the decades. For example, we’ve begun a free program that offers digital training skills to low-income, minority older adults to help them navigate in a world that is more and more technology focused,” he said. “In addition to our wide array of courses, we’ve started to develop shared interest groups that are more focused on socialization."
Creating Meaningful Connections
Public interest in active aging and lifelong learning has grown year after year, Brunner said. There has been a great deal of research “on how to stay healthy and live as long as possible, which indicates that social connections are essential,” he said.
“Our programs, both the traditional lecture and discussion and the more informal shared interest groups, are designed to promote meaningful personal connections. One of our social interest groups is called Cocktails and Conversations where they meet at restaurants, have a nice meal together and talk about current events while another group gets together to play ping pong,” he said. “We have a beading group and a French shared interest group where they go to restaurants and speak French. We are consciously and intentionally trying to incorporate that social aspect of learning into what we do."
For Laura Nebel, who at 97-years-young is the very definition of a lifelong learner, the social connections she’s built through OLLI are essential.
“It has been so important for me to become immersed in the city life and OLLI made it so comfortable to do so. I think for me personally it’s the combination of a sense of community, intellectual exercise and interaction with all kinds of people and ideas,” she said. “To me, I think a lifelong learner is a sociable question and answer seeker. I decided long ago that I’m not going to concentrate on the years in my life but on the life in my years.”
The “caliber and variety of classes” have kept Nebel coming back to OLLI year after year, she said.
“I think of OLLI as a great vegetable soup of people and experiences,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed so many of the classes — I’ve taken Betsy Reese’s class on Inciting Joy, courses on the government and the Constitution.” she said. “I was also determined not to be left behind and to keep abreast with technology — I took a class on how to use Zoom!”
Laura Nebel
Laura Nebel
“I decided long ago that I’m not going to concentrate on the years in my life but on the life in my years.”
For Ninerell, a chance meeting on a bus led to a lifelong friendship with a distinctive OLLI connection.
“I remember going to one of my first OLLI classes after moving back into the city. I met a woman on the bus. We were talking and I asked her where she was going,” she said. “It turned out she was also going to OLLI — we sat next to each other in class and have remained such good friends ever since. I often think back to that bus ride and that chance meeting that produced such a wonderful friendship.”
OLLI, Ninerell said, “opens avenues to exploration.”
“I’ve taken a class called Short Tales and Book Bites for about 15 years straight and our teacher, Sol Glassberg, was 100 years old!” she said. “Just thinking about a man who was 100 and had been an electrical engineer teaching a literature class, it was so compelling, a beautiful thing really.”
“With OLLI, we’d often go to class and then have lunch; the teacher would come in and sit with us, and we would continue discussing a book, or a story or just life in general. That was truly an immense and important part of the program — the connections we made and what we were learning about continued outside the classroom.”
Bringing
Life Lessons
Into the Classroom
According to Brunner, as the years have passed and technology has marched forward, the way OLLI provides its courses has evolved right along with it. That became particularly essential during the height of COVID, he said, when the programs moved entirely online.
“OLLI having offerings throughout the pandemic saved so many of us from going crazy or getting lonely,” Ninerell said.
Today, OLLI courses are offered both in person at Temple’s Center City and Ambler campuses, online and, in some cases, in a hybrid format.
“We’re currently experimenting with a course format called HyFlex where the instructor is able to teach online while the students might get together both online and in person at Temple Center City or Temple University Ambler, or both. It’s a way to meet people where they are, even if they can’t all meet in the same location,” he said. “This semester we’re also experimenting with some evening classes. We’re additionally continuing to grow our tech tutoring program, which is supported by a grant from AARP — we’ve started a digital training skills program at Main Campus which includes both computer and smartphone training."
Brunner said OLLI engages its members as volunteers in many ways.
“Members can start Shared Interest Groups. Others volunteer on committees to help with operational aspects of program,” he said. “We also have a member-led lending library, and several committees, such as Special Events, Curriculum and Marketing.”
All of OLLI instructors are volunteers, Brunner said, “some of whom started by attending classes and ultimately decide to teach.”
“They become instructors because they are passionate about a subject — they genuinely love it and want to share it with others. They research their topics and develop their classes,” he said. “In my experience as a teacher myself, there is no better way to learn than to teach — science, medicine, health, these are all fields that are evolving at a pace quicker than ever before, so you must stay up to date. For many of our instructors, they want to teach because they care about the world around them and about what is happening in our society.”
Instructor Lynn Marks’ association with OLLI began when it was still known as TARP (Temple Association of Retired Professionals).
“I was part of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts and was invited to be a guest speaker. I spoke a few times about the justice system and put that experience in the back of my mind, that I might be interested in teaching with the program sometime in the future,” said Marks, a public interest lawyer who was Executive Director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts. “I left my job in 2016 and began to think about what I wanted to do next. The idea of teaching came back to me, but I didn’t think I wanted to be in a traditional classroom with exams and papers.”
Marks said she felt it would be “much better to use my skills as a facilitator and use my contacts to bring in expert speakers on various topics.”
“When I decided to teach, I asked Judge Phyllis Beck if she would teach with me — we had worked closely together at Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts on all kinds of court reform issues. She was both a mentor and a very close friend,” Marks said. “I thought it would be good to have a lawyer and activist and a judge's perspective; we both pulled our contacts to find good speakers.”
Over the years, Marks said, her courses have primarily explored “policy issues from different perspectives.”
“It’s called Hot Topics in Justice and Law. Generally, our topics address social and criminal justice issues, politics and the Constitution — our speakers are experts who have a passion for their topic,” she said. “They’ve included political and community leaders, judges, scholars, pollsters, journalists; we try to keep the schedule somewhat flexible so that we can address current news cycles. ”
I think one of the beauties of OLLI is that the members truly are lifelong learners — there’s a strong social and intellectual component — and they are eager to learn and share different perspectives.”
While many instructors share their knowledge from their professional experience, others have taken decidedly different paths to the front of the classroom, Brunner said.
“We have a healthcare administrator who sings folk music, so he's taught classes focusing on American folk music. He's also very interested in politics, so he teaches a course about the Constitution,” he said. “There’s another gentleman who was a very successful prosecutor, but he always had an interest in art. When he retired, he went to Oxford University in England and pursued his master’s degree in art history — he came back and is teaching art history to our members.”
Jim Pagliaro had a successful law practice for 43 years. He also had a lifelong love of the arts. The latter brought him to the front of an OLLI classroom.
“I think there's a lot of value for people when they hit a certain time in life where they have more time available than they did in the height of their busy career to expand their learning opportunities.”
“I have a deep commitment to sharing my interest in the arts and in art history with people. I’ve been a docent at the Philadelphia Art Museum for 25 years and I enjoyed doing that,” said Pagliaro, who teaches OLLI courses at Ambler Campus and online. “I thought once I retired, I'd expand my repertoire and try talking to adult audiences about the trends and periods of art history rather than just looking at paintings in a museum.”
Typically, Pagliaro said, he’ll focus on a movement or individual artists.
“For example, I may talk about the rise of Impressionism or about Baroque art in Rome. I may talk about the Middle Ages — I recently did a talk on Chartres Cathedral,” he said. “I’ll give a talk about Venice and a virtual tour combining art and architecture or I’ll give a talk about Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Mary Cassatt — or any of the Impressionists individually.”
As an instructor, Pagliaro said, “I think there's a lot of value for people when they hit a certain time in life where they have more time available than they did in the height of their busy career to expand their learning opportunities.”
“Lifelong learning is important to me. I still take courses myself, and I just think it's critical to keep yourself engaged — to have something that is a form of commitment. It keeps you vibrant and challenged in life,” he said. “I was a trial lawyer so I was in court a lot, in front of judges a lot, interacting with people. Teaching is a way to continue to communicate with people, to share ideas with them, to take really complex concepts and make them easier to assimilate for an audience — I enjoy interacting with people.”
When getting in front of a class, Pagliaro hopes OLLI members “really participate with vigor, to ask questions and continue to expand their horizons.”
“Art is one of those things that people say all their lives ‘Someday I'm going to learn more about this stuff. I'm going to understand why this painting is beside this painting in this museum gallery and what's the connection between them. Why is this movement important? What did it mean?’ Maybe they just didn’t have the time to dig into it; it wasn’t their priority,” he said. “Now they begin to get why these particular paintings are exhibited together and what their significance is in the development and progress of Western art history. There are connections in the history of art — connecting those dots is critical to me, getting people to that ‘Aha!’ moment!”
Experiences to Last a Lifetime
OLLI has always been full of those “I get it now!” moments, moments that require critical thinking, reflection and discussion.
According to Brunner, one the key pillars “of maintaining your health and extending your lifespan is experiences like those you would encounter in a lifelong learning program.”
“Research clearly shows that in order to maintain cognitive health over time you have to strain your brain. We're learning now that no matter what your age — you could be 100 years old —due to the brain's capacity for neuroplasticity, you can continue to build new neural pathways in your brain,” he said. “That's one of the best ways of keeping your brain healthy, to learn things that really require your brain to stretch outside its comfort zone, learning a subject that maybe doesn't come easy to you.”
OLLI instructors, Ninerell said, provide participants with unique experiences and opportunities that they might not otherwise have had.
“The program has given me some leadership opportunities, which I didn’t expect. I was very reluctant to lead a presentation but someone else in the class who I’d say was a leader offered to work with me. It really made me think a lot about how to approach a presentation — I used to be a teacher and it was great to bring back some of those skills. Everyone was very encouraging and that felt very good. We were studying the Seven Deadly Sins, and I read the story Fat by Raymond Carver — we each took a sin to study and since I was presenting about gluttony, I brought in snacks!”
OLLI has also helped build bridges between generations, Ninerell said.
“Adam (Brunner) collaborated with a Temple psychology professor, Tania Giovannetti and an OLLI volunteer, Barbara Shaiman, to develop an intergenerational course on the Psychology of Aging. He asked if I would be a part of it, and it was such a wonderful year,” she said. “We met young people at Temple and everyone shared some of their thoughts about different topics. It was really a blessing to be in that class and have them interested in learning from our life experience. In turn, we learned the ‘lingo’ of the younger people, and that was really nice.”
Ninerell recalled taking a class on banned books “which was fascinating” and provided another opportunity for the students to move out of their comfort zones.
“Each of us had to read and share about a particular banned book — mine was Charlotte’s Web. Then we researched the whole history of how it was banned and why it was banned; in the case of Charlotte’s Web it was because it had animals talking,” she said. “As class members, we got together and we did some presentations in the City of Philadelphia for various groups. It was amazing how a lot of people came out to listen to us.”
Socialization is another essential key to longevity, Brunner said.
“People who keep themselves isolated often end up less healthy. Being with people tends to decrease depression and reduce stress — stress is one of the biggest threats to longevity,” he said. “We’ve offered courses in yoga and meditation and we’re exploring a partnership that would give us the opportunity to provide dance classes again. One of the components of a class I teach is how to create personal change and developing motivating factors that support a long, healthy and engaging life.”
Ninerell called the OLLI program “a lifesaver” for her.
“I think if you’re going through something — a death, health concerns, a break-up, a change in your life — it takes your mind off of that. You’re distracted by wonderful things and meet nice people who are kind and caring; in tough times it’s been a joy,” she said. “I’ve made some very supportive friends and learned from extremely knowledgeable people. OLLI has always been compatible with my curiosity. I even signed up for something about Shakespeare this semester, which I can say I have never done before.”
“At 81 I want to be able to say I still have an open, curious mind!”
Paula Ninerell
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