EPALE ARTICLE

The Flourish Center project encourages community collaboration through cultural heritage. The cultural elements act as a bridge between communities and strength for intergenerational learning. The activities of this project will take on a mixed format and encourage youth between 18-and 30 to work collaboratively with disadvantaged older adults over 65 years old to establish and record the process of creating a cultural heritage product. This will promote an environment of knowledge and skill exchange, active cultural participation, and digital capacity building in a framework of cooperation and meaningful learning, which is the foundation for a less divided and exclusionary society.

The impact of the project on the target groups will be significant. Adults will gain more digital skills, and awareness of their active participation in society and will form strong cultural links to improve social inclusion. Young people who will participate in the project, through mutual learning with different generations will develop different digital skills and will be more aware of their cultural heritage. Adult educators will have the opportunity to create a network to include and promote the social inclusion of older adults through active participation.

FLOURISH project will have three main results that are the following:

● An online platform with learning modules about intergenerational learning and digital activities around cultural heritage for adult educators on the one hand and adults, seniors and youth on the other.

● Affinity spaces in the form of a series of face-to-face workshops between young people and seniors to create multimedia products for the promotion of cultural heritage

● An online exhibition space to share a new modern and digital vision of cultural heritage inspired by the work carried out by the project target groups in the different partner countries

At this stage of the project, the partners are developing the different training modules to develop a MOODLE platform with a digital infrastructure that will ensure that the target groups can fully harness the benefits of intergenerational learning.

Each learning module will develop one specific topic addressed to adult educators and /or young or elder adults. Here are the topics that will be covered by the different learning units:

• Practical Guide to completing intergenerational activity during the workshop.

This learning unit will be addressed to adult educators willing to implement intergenerational activity with their target groups. It will help them to understand better the concept of an intergenerational activity by providing them with some theotrical input and then by guiding them via step by step activities that they can easily implement. The guide will include also the measurement of the impact that adult educators can use to evaluate their workshops and to identify the level of impact on the target group.

• The intergenerational approach to Learning & Teaching

This additional unit will focus on different modes of intergenerational teaching that helps students learn in innovative and collaborative ways, focusing on the flipped classroom, peer-to-peer learning, and group reflection conversations.

• Culture as a bridge to communicate

Culture and communication are closely interrelated and are the foundation of everyday life. Culture can present a meeting point; people can communicate on basis of commonalities and shared experiences. This module will present the definitions of the main concepts of culture and communication and delve into the ways both culture and communication are interrelated.

• Digital tools and intergenerational socialization and communication

In this module, types of digital interaction between young people and older people will be introduced. Nowadays digital tools are becoming more and more popular among seniors. This learning unit will explain which digital tools are most popular and useful for seniors, which benefits can seniors get from using them and how the interaction between youth and seniors happens when they are using digital tools together. One of the most important topics here is the interaction between grandchildren and grandparents in a family with the help of communication apps, video games, social networks, art apps, etc. The module will cover the question of teaching seniors how to use digital tools and how to make their user experience better to increase the popularity of digital tools among seniors.

• How to create a video for cultural communication.

The importance of cultural communication in societies and communities is essential for the maintenance of social cohesion. The creation of cultural communication video can be used as a bridge amongst the generations to promote the cultural identity of a region, enhance the digital skills of the elderly adults and their inclusion in society after its digital transformation. In addition, the guidelines, as well as the whole Module’s content, can be offered to the adult educators as an interactive tool, which can be provided easily through training activities.

• Intergenerational Communication

Intergenerational communication is of vital importance because even though it is ubiquitous), there is still a strong potential for miscommunication and unsatisfying intergenerational interactions. This module aims to bring to the fore the challenges involved in intergenerational communication – such as age stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination – and, subsequently, identify and discuss opportunities and possibilities – such as lifelong learning and meaningful interactions, through new and old technologies.

The modules listed above will be added to the platform soon and then published on the project website https://flourish-centers.eu/. Stay tuned for news!