CINAGE COURSE – a very personal experience of formal intergenerational education and learning

Written on 14 January 2015.

In the framework of CINAGE European cinema for active ageing project supported by the European Commission, have been conducting and attending a CINAGE course for adult educators and older students. The course is meant for us to get familiar with different active ageing policies (WHO, OECD and the European Commission) and definitions focusing on a number of active ageing competencies as they appear in European films.

But do they appear? A small scale research preceding the CINAGE course has revealed that older age is still being portrayed through numerous old age stereotypes (primitive thinking schemes), whereas for today’s active ageing several competencies are needed. There are emotional competence, civic competence, economic and financial competence, health and learning competence, intergenerational competence and some others. All of them are important for analysing the role of European cinema in encouraging older people to take on a variety of new post modern social roles. It seems that older people ever more continue living their lives without experiencing a major interruption after retirement. They create new social networks, they learn…

Older people can learn together with younger people if they all assume interchangeable roles of teachers and students. Through mutual, reciprocal and co-operative learning they exchange knowledge and create new knowledge together.

A group of young students from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, University of Ljubljana joined older students at Slovenian Third Age University. For them “teaching” and , moreover, teaching older people over sixty is a unique and prime experience, whereas for older students filmmaking is a more or less totally new experience as well. What happens when different groups of “beginners” meet? The older students have brought into this course their experience with teaching creative writing, journalism, adult education, didactics, piloting a plane, being a TV script girl, being a researcher in social sciences, being a university teacher, being a cinema goer and lover etc. Some of them manage French or Italian and have reported about Deleuze’ lecture on creative act and cinema, about different rather specific film directors or script writers and their techniques, etc.Some had shot one or two professional educational films… On the other hand young students from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television have been offering their professional knowledge guiding the group in their reflection on the structure and the message of short films…