Since last year, partners of the Erasmus+ KA2 project “E4ALL: More attractive and inclusive education for all generations” have been addressing this core question, sharing and exchanging good practices and insights from a diverse range of educational approaches and backgrounds, aiming at supporting educators in designing, delivering and promoting educational activities in multigenerational contexts.

During the training  held in Vienna Neustadt, at the beginning of May, the Italian partner EduVita had the opportunity to share its knowledge and experience in intergenerational learning, as an innovative approach to promote mutual, collaborative and student-centered learning within groups of all ages.

The first challenging task when dealing with the IGL approach is defining what intergenerational learning is, and clarifying all the fuzzy boundaries around this concept. EduVita proposed to E4ALL partners to co-construct the meaning of IGL learning, with a creative brainstorming triggered by Dixit Cards. This preliminary activity was followed by a deeper insight into the specific features of IGL learning in contrast with multigenerational learning.

Next step: what are the needs of the students in IGL environments and what are the challenges of their educators? Using an interactive tool Mentimeter, E4ALL participants contributed, sharing their ideas to shape the answer collectively.

Learn it,practice it! The first session was concluded with an interactive language learning activity in order to let the participants put into practice what they had just learnt about from the theoretical introduction. After “multigenerational couples” were formed, each of the participants had to draw his/her partner’s portrait and then learn some basic words and sentences to describe it, using the native language of the partner. From the silent empathic connection of reciprocal drawing to the mutual effort of teaching and learning from each other, this activity allowed the participants to experience what intergenerational learning can be like, both as students and as educators. At the same time, it offered the group a great opportunity to learn some Chinese, Greek, Italian, Polish, Gallego, German and Spanish!

These good practices have been acquired by EduVita during the Erasmus+ KA2 project  “Intergenerational Bridge: Connect to Create”, thanks to collaboration with the partners working with elderly people and IGL education.

How can IGL educators create a safe and inclusive learning environment? In the second session, EduVita showed how art-therapy can be adapted and implemented in IGL learning, as a tool to promote group cohesion through non-verbal ways of expression.

One fundamental aspect when dealing with multigenerational groups is a “step-by-step” group integration (individual-couples or small groups- full group), which allows the participants to get to know each other, and learn to trust their group mates progressively and safely. After the individual brainstorming about IGL education and the language activity in couples, EduVita proposed a group workshop to let participants create something altogether and interact creatively. EduVita’s team, guided the participants in the co-creation of a Group Portrait, an art-therapy good practice they had experienced in Warsaw, during the Erasmus+KA2 project “Art Bridge”.

No extraordinary painters’ skills required! The participants only had to tear apart colorful papers and then stick them to a bigger carton paper. The result was… brilliant!

During the process of art-making, participants had the opportunity to collaborate, strengthen the interpersonal bounds and find their place in the metaphorical space of the big carton paper, representing the group learning environment. This activity proved to be an effective tool for participants to reflect on their attitudes and roles in the team as well as for facilitators, to observe group dynamics and spot learners’ needs.

 At the end of the session, participants were ready to work together! In small multigenerational teams, they designed an intergenerational workshop for specific targets (such as senior citizens and university students), implementing knowledge and tools they had been exploring during the day and learning from each other’s experiences of the IGL session.

If you want to try out this workshop with your team, you can upload the materials for the workshop on the website.

The project “E4All – More attractive and inclusive education for all generations” is coordinated by Foundation of Alternative Educational Initiatives (Poland) in collaboration with EduVita (Italy), Escuela Oficial de Idiomas Madrid-Villaverde (Spain), Challedu (Greece), European Initiative for Education (Austria), Ecological Future Education (Latvia) 

Author: Filomena Locantore, creative copywriter and adult educator