At the intersection of storytelling, aging, and higher education

Last week we hosted a great conversation on the Future Trends Forum.  The topic was the intersection of storytelling, aging, and higher education.

Today I’d like to share the recording of that session, along with the resources which participants contributed, plus a list of major themes addressed.

Our guests were Joe Lambert, a world-renowned leader in digital storytelling, co-founded of what eventually became StoryCenter, and most recently the author of Story, Aging and the Art of Making Meaning, plus Stephen Katz, professor emeritus of sociology and Distinguished Research Award recipient at Trent University.  Nearly one hundred participants were in the audience over our meeting hour.

It was a moving, thoughtful, and challenging conversation.  I hope you find the following of use.

1. The recording

To begin with, here’s the full recording on YouTube:

2. Resources

Resources we shared:

“The New Students at This Liberal Arts College Are in Their 80s” – a Wall Street Journal article on Goucher College teaching some local senior citizens.

A Planet Money conversation about mandatory retirement.

Participant and old friend Alan Levine’s blog posts: “Sourcing the Saying of the Three Deaths” – on memory and mourning. “Granny’s Stories”.

Joe Lambert, Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience.

David Longanecker, The Late Truck Driver: Following the Dream, the story of a higher education administrator who retired… to become a truck driver. (Amazon)

Bronnie Ware, The Regrets of the Dying.

Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. 

Tatiana Rodriguez, “Ever think about your family’s legacy?” : “I had a college student record a video podcast with me about his family legacy:”

Joe’s podcast, ElderWare: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century.

My podcast is about getting older and sharing stories, and the ways in which technology will impact this work in the near future. On it you’ll hear a mix of conversations with authorities and experts in a range of fields, conversations with reports from my own experimentation with new apps, bots and tools.You should listen if you are interested in the future of getting older and the stories we will have to tell.

The Age-Friendly University Global Network is a consortium of higher education institutions committed to promoting positive and healthy aging and enhancing the lives of older members of the global community through innovative educational programs, research agendas, curriculum development, online education, health and wellness activities, arts and culture programs, and civic engagement opportunities.

Two projects from Chris Wakaluk: a podcast, The Stories That Brought You Here, and My Audio Memoir, a process for recording family history.

Storyworth, a service which helps people tell their stories.

Dear Photograph, a simple image+text story creation service.

Every Age Counts, an Australian group against ageism.

Timeslips, a nonprofit:

We aim to change the way people understand and experience aging by bringing young people into positive relationships with elders; enabling family members to have meaningful emotional connections despite cognitive changes; and infusing creativity into our care systems by inspiring staff to feed their own creativity while inviting elders to imagine and express themselves.

Climate and Aging, a nonprofit working on intergenerational responses to the climate crisis.

The LGBT History Project hosted at Dickinson College:

The LGBT Center of Central PA and the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections have partnered to document the stories and history of LGBT life and activism in the greater Central Pennsylvania region. This site contains oral histories that have been recorded for the LGBT History Project, as well as fully accessible digital versions of documents, images, and artifacts that have been donated to the project.

The Knox County Black History Archives, hosted at Kenyon College: “Discovering African American History in Rural Ohio.”

Generations United: “The mission of Generations United is to improve the lives of children, youth, and older people through intergenerational collaboration, public policies, and programs for the enduring benefit of all.”

Intergenerational Schools, “Award-winning, tuition-free public charter schools offering individualized instruction in an intergenerational community.”

The Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) at Assumption University.

The Penn State University Intergenerational Program (PSIP):

Since 2001, the PSIP has been instrumental in developing and piloting new intergenerational models and curricular materials spanning the areas of civic engagement and community planning, nutrition education, environmental education, early childhood education, kinship family support, and farm family succession planning.

3. Themes from the conversation

Extracted and anonymized, in the order they arose:

An important shift, from generational divide to generational sharing.  Including multiple generations within higher education.  (“In university, we often have middle-aged people teaching young people about older people, but we don’t have older people.”) Combine experiential with intergenerational education.

Mandatory retirement can cost people the meaning they find in work and institutions their tacit knowledge.

How to include elders’ wisdom and experience in redesigning higher education?  How can we educate young people to not fear aging?  Should we offer different assessments based on age?

Identity does not stop with aging.

The importance of listening to elders’ stories and recording them before it’s too late.

Whose voices represent aging, and whose are unheard?  For the latter, minoritized populations and the working class.  Reframing “AI” to “ancestor intelligence.”

A model of stages of aging: youth, adulthood, a third age (retirement, roughly), then the fourth age.  The fourth age seriously lacks stories in our culture.

The need for critical gerontology, for decolonizing aging worldwide.

How can technology help us tell stories of aging, to connect across all ages?

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Many thanks to Stephen and Joe for their thoughtful conversation.  And more thanks to the Forum community for sharing experience and questions.  I hope to bring the guests and topic back in a few months.

PS: is this Forum summary useful to you?  I can do more if so.