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Personal Reflection/Anecdote

mentoring, service opportunities, speaking and publishing at various levels, and learning for education
and personal and professional growth. Rensink gave suggestions for engagement, such as having hybrid
Zoom meetings with a member other than the president or presider at the controls and gearing meetings
toward the varied needs of members.
In another application of relevance, conference attendees had the opportunity to learn about the
difficulties of teaching history to Russians in Estonia. Many long-standing Estonian families still speak
Russian and have close ties to relatives living in Russia. Conference attendees learned about Estonia
being part of the USSR for the better part of the 1900s but breaking free in 1991—around the same time
as Latvia and Lithuania. However, many schools still instruct students in Russian, and school leaders
are having difficulty changing that due to the Karaganov Doctrine passed in Russia in 1992, stating that
Russia can protect Russians in surrounding countries. This history, which all relates back to World War
II, still has relevance today considering the recent events regarding Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian
peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that is still ongoing.

Sustainability
The final theme, sustainability, is the “ability to maintain or support a process over time” (Mollenkamp,
2023). Sustainability might have been the most noticeable thread running throughout the conference.
First, how does one sustain long-term learning? One starts with the brain, giving it physical exercise, rest,
a predictable routine, healthy foods, and mentally stimulating activities. Dr. Minna Huotilainen from the
University of Helsinki also explained that physical activity preps the brain for learning, and, with older
adults, walking three times per week at a quick pace for 40 minutes increases memory ability. Huotilainen
also discussed how women started entering the labor force in Finland and many other countries in the
early 1900s and showed the progress of sustaining women’s presence into the current era. The choice for
women had always been either to be a mother and have a family or to have an education and a career. By
the 1960s, women were beginning to be introduced into the workforce on a larger scale and no longer
had to choose between work or having a family, but they weren’t allowed to complain about the increased
workload or unbalanced household division of labor. They had asked for it, after all! By the 1980s, women
could at least admit that they were tired, but the steps toward equality were far from over. Having both
parents working was becoming more common. Into the 2000s, most households had two working parents,
making single-parent households difficult to sustain. The lines are now more blurred about what should be
taught at home versus at school and which takes precedence. The idea of adding and retaining women in
the workforce has sustained for many decades and
has now become the norm.
In a completely different setting, Dr. Ulla
Häggblom from the Tampere University of
Applied Sciences discussed her current projects
related to bioproducts engineering. One project
example is that students in her program found
a way to use the wasted hulls from oats in
breadmaking to make paper. The paper was then
used to make the bags used to give the bread to
the customers. As she explained, waste from one
source can be a resource for another. This idea of
sustainable product development and reusing the
leftover material from one process to create a new Indiana State Organization attendees. Picture L to R:
product shows how bioproduct engineering can Lois Vogel, Jo Jones, Simone Nance, Jennifer Nance,
increase the sustainability of resources and reduce Roni Embry, and Carol Herzog.

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