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Community Connections Count: An Interview with Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak
Community Connections Count: An Interview with Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak
By Bethany Ozorak ’13, Davies & Fahrner Assistant Director for Community-Based Projects
A professor of psychology for the past 30 years at Allegheny College and Meadville Market House Authority board member, Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak has always been invested in the community and community-based learning for her students. Historically, her teaching and leadership connected with community initiatives and scholarship. I had the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth about why she felt community connections were important and how she engaged her students to connect beyond Allegheny.
1Tell us how you became involved with and are currently engaged in the community?
I grew up in a small town where everyone was pretty much involved with everything, so it seems normal to me to be involved where you live. If you want something to happen, you talk to people, you find out what’s already going on and what still needs to happen, and you put your shoulder to the wheel. When I moved to Meadville, I found a community that already had a great deal going on, and a lot of Allegheny students were already involved in the community through service, work, and other kinds of participation. What we didn’t have, at that point, was a curricular entry point or a way of connecting classroom learning with community-based learning. I started by involving my first-year seminar students in the
Fall 2019 | ENGAGED 5 community. Those seminars are ideal because the faculty members get to choose the content that interests them — it just has to serve as a springboard for writing and speaking skills. Over time, I came to believe that we needed more of a curricular structure. I talked to a lot of like-minded colleagues, and eventually a group of us sat down and drafted out the Values, Ethics & Social Action (VESA) program. That program is now Community & Justice Studies. I don’t formally teach in the program these days, but I still involve community-based learning in most of the courses I teach, because I don’t think you can teach about community without spending time in one, and this is the community we have in common. It’s also great for me to be able to draw on the expertise of others — for example, having the mayor or one of the county commissioners come to my class and explain local government from the inside perspective. In addition, students usually enjoy it, it’s memorable, and it helps them connect what they’re learning now with what they may be doing five or 10 years from now. 2 You have
taught several community-based courses. How have you engaged students to connect with the community and what do you hope they have gained from the experience?
I started out with service-learning — students doing various tasks in the community as part of the requirements for the course. I’ve moved away from that for a couple of reasons. First, with all of the great things going on through the Gateway, many students are already doing service, internships, or work study downtown, and they are maxed out with that. Second, depending on the course, students may need to learn a lot before they can truly make an impact. So I look more for opportunities where students can tap into what’s happening and we can try to apply that directly to the more theoretical knowledge they’re getting from the course readings. I teach a lot of courses about food, for example, so I’ll take students to the Market House downtown to look around and talk to the Market Master, Alice Sjolander, maybe to Tarot Bean while we’re in the neighborhood,
Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak Story continued on page 6
and sometimes also to farms. I know that sometimes students will then go back and buy from those businesses, and they’ll take their friends, so it is win-win. In the past, I have had students conduct simple surveys or make brochures, at the request of the community partner.
This past semester, thanks to a grant through the Great Lakes Colleges Association Oral History in the Liberal Arts program,* I was able to set up an interview project for my Community Psychology course, partnering with the Wesbury United Methodist Retirement Community. The class spent the semester exploring various aspects of the broader question, “What makes a community thrive?” And I thought, “Who better to talk about what makes our community thrive than people who have lived here for
decades, maybe even their whole life?” So each of the 20 students conducted an interview with a Wesbury resident who had lived in the area for more than 30 years. The students then went through the interview transcripts and pulled out recurring themes. And then my son Nick Ozorak, Allegheny class of 2013, used those themes and excerpts from the interviews to create a short documentary video about what has helped Meadville to thrive over the years. The class had a video release party up at Wesbury so that members of the wider community could enjoy the takeaway messages of the interviews. The video link was also posted on Facebook and can be accessed on the Northwest PA Heritage website.**
The most important take-away from all of these activities is that students meet and talk to community residents whom they otherwise might never know. They get to hear from people with different life stories and skill sets than their own. Maybe they’ll now be able to put a face to the local government or where their coffee comes from. They make connections in the community, and those connections make us better neighbors and partners.
3How do you think your community-based courses have benefited the community?
That is a complicated issue. When students do service, it’s easy to count the hours and point to tasks accomplished. Of course that’s important, but it’s not the only thing that matters. As I said before, when we know each other, we are better neighbors and better partners.
Students who become invested in the community will spend more time — and money — around town.
They will get involved in a wider range of community activities. They may vote locally. They will be better informed. And they may make friends, they may find a mentor or be a mentor off campus. Those community connections are valuable in themselves.
To use the interview project as an example, the students didn’t do anything that would normally count as “service.” But many of the Wesbury residents commented afterwards how much they enjoyed telling their stories and sharing their opinions. And at the release party, it was clear that the residents — not just the ones who were interviewed, their friends and neighbors too — loved that video. They loved seeing themselves represented to the world in such a positive way.
4Through your experience, what do you believe is needed for sustainable community engagement?
What makes a partnership sustainable is a feeling that the efforts and the benefits are equitably distributed. The partnership also needs to be realistic in its scope. Whenever I’m partnering with a community site, I talk with folks there beforehand and we arrive at a plan that we see as mutually beneficial. It’s important to respect not just their expertise, but also their time. This is a small town. We could wear out our welcome if we took our partners for granted. They are making time and space for us, so I want to make sure that we don’t waste that opportunity. When a community partner says, “Please come back again, next time you teach this course,” I know we’ve done something right.
Institutionally, we moved far in the right direction from where we were when I first arrived in 1989. We have good curricular and co-curricular structures. We have people who are communicating regularly with partners in the area and guiding students to make good choices. There is always room for improvement, but we are much more mindful about our community connections now than we were even 20 years ago.
