Intergenerational Learning

 

Right now I have the great privilege of running an intergenerational writing program for high school students and older adults (a.k.a. senior citizens). The program is a five-week series where participants work in pairs (older-younger teams) to create and share their life stories.

I was worried about getting youth to participate and so offered an incentive of a $100 gift card along with community service hours. In the first session, I could barely get any of the young people to speak. And I worried about the elders too. I feared that they would struggle to relate to the young people, perhaps feeling offended by their manners or their attitudes. But the older members of the group seem thrilled just to be in the space of the youngers. “I like the energy,” one said on our very first day.

Now we’re three weeks in and this intergenerational program is nothing short of amazing.

Each week we do some kind of team-building warm-up so the larger group can get to know each other. Then we break into pairs where dyads do some interviewing and some writing. Last week I had everyone line up by age without speaking. There are four teens and four elders. They dutifully did as asked and were surprisingly accurate in their lineup. In order, from youngest to oldest, they placed themselves against the counter along the side of the room — 14, 14, 15, 16, 68, 80, 81, 82.

For the next part of the activity, I invited them to choose the age they would choose to be if they could choose any age and reposition themselves in that spot along the line. The first fourteen-year-old said he’d want to be nineteen. He said he thought it would be a good age because he’d be older but still young. The second fourteen-year-old said she’d like to be twenty-two so she could be out of college and getting ready for real life. The fifteen-year-old girl after her wanted to be twenty-one and the last sixteen-year-old boy wanted to be twenty, “so that he could be in college but still get support from his family.”

The eighty-year-old woman in the elder group said she’d like to be forty. “Forty,” she said, “is when my real life began. It’s when I became truly independent.” The next elder to go was the sixty-eight-year-old. “You know,” she said, “I’d like to be exactly this age. I love being this age.” The eighty-one-year-old said that she’d like to be fifty because that’s when she felt like she was finally getting wise. And last to go, the eldest of the group at eighty-two, said, “I’d like to be thirty. When I was thirty I traveled the world. I’d like to travel the world again.”

“What a gift,” I thought to myself as I watched the younger participants listen to the elders. The kids could only imagine five or six years beyond their current ages but the elders had chosen a span of almost forty years. Forty years of wisdom. “What a gift for these young people,” I thought, “to hear this insight into what life can be like in the years far beyond their imaginations.”

Yesterday we did an activity where people shared things they liked or disliked about their neighborhood and the world. Every single elder said that they felt like their communities were too quiet. They missed the noise of young people— the laughing, the yelling, the wildness. And the kids complained about their own brand of isolation; they talked about feeling isolated, affected by crime or living far away from friends.

At the end of yesterday’s session, after a full hour of writing exercises, we closed the group as we always do with a circle where everyone shares something about their experience that day. The eldest participant shared a letter that she’d written to her partner, a fourteen-year-old girl. “Dear — — -,” it started, “the wisdom I have gained from talking to you today fills me with hope….” She read the whole letter talking about things she’d learned from talking to her young partner that day.

For his closing, the fourteen-year-old boy who’d shared his fear of crime in his community laughed to the group, “An hour is not enough time for this. We need a whole day.”

We still have two of the five sessions to go and three of the four youth participants have asked if they could do it again. My fear of engaging these young and old people together was unfounded, completely misguided. These pairings of young and old seem meant to be. They are like the Yin and Yang coming together to create perfect harmony.