Intergenerational Learning

and dialogue

There is a stillness in the air as he sits like a tiny Buddha on my knee. I am getting acquainted with my newest grandson whilst his mother is upstairs. He was born under an hour before my birthday in January, our lives, separated by seventy-three years, coincide in this one moment.

He sits erect revelling in his ability to support himself through the burgeoning strength of a child of four months. My crooked arm rests behind him ready to support and I hold his substantial stomach to stop him pitching forward. His pale smooth hand clasps my finger throwing a contrast of ageing, and I look down on the furrowed vein ridged skin weathered and worn by use.

We breathe quietly together, and I can feel his heart beat. He stares ahead. I close my eyes to drown in the beginnings and the endings.

There is a silence in the fourth floor flat in Copenhagen. A silence that is complete, leaving no memory. Just a sense, a feeling of no separation. We are united by vulnerability and held by the tangibility of love that flows through and around us.

His mother comes into the room. He sees her and gently straightens his body. That time has passed as has the acquaintance. We now understand each other. A bond has been created and will endure as long as at least one of us is alive.

Modern life has us divided by race, gender, nationality and age. The core of our learning is presented as competition, one individual pitted against another, opinion against opinion. Comparison is demanded of us. I am better, superior; you are inferior, worse than me. From birth we are required to take up arms to defend ourselves so that we survive in a world of an illusory enemy determined to overcome us.

Who will win the argument this time? Who will win the fight?

This determination to separate, categorise, and pigeonhole threatens our survival through war, economic and social inequality, and the destruction of the natural world. Harmony is unobtainable, peace an impossibility and balance a failed ideal.

Is it possible to close these divisions through intergenerational dialogue and by learning together.

My father was sitting in his chair and around the room were several of my brothers, some of my children, my wife and myself. He was not well. He hadn’t been well for some years. He needed to use a walker to aid his mobility, he slept downstairs and spent much of the day sitting in that chair; often just staring ahead.

This evening he was quietly listening to the conversation.

‘Andrew,’ he said, looking clearly at me. ‘I think we can say that we understand each other, don’t you?’

This came out of nowhere and I hesitated to answer.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I think we do.’

He smiled and nodded.

We left the next day, but that morning he was complaining of pains in his stomach.

I returned just a couple of days later to visit him in hospital.

‘Help me… Help me,’ he cried.

I was standing at the end of the bed next to my mother.

He died that night.

Intergenerational conversations open up worlds of understanding across time.

For many the basic assumption about intergenerational interaction is that it involves the passing down of rules, traditions, and codes by which you should live from generation to generation. This assumption does not consider the fact that we are unique individuals who have the capacity to discover life for ourselves. Each generation faces a changing world within which they must establish themselves with new eyes and new minds. Much is learnt and understood through conversations which allow the free flow of questions, of inquiry, and of insight: and, I would suggest, it is essential that these conversations or dialogues are intergenerational.

It is the way that we come together as generations, our value of each other and the diversity that exists, not just across ages but also beyond everything that divides us. It is the respect and willingness to listen, to observe each other and ourselves that creates a different culture through which we can communicate.

For seventeen years I lived in an educational community in which I worked with children aged from five to eleven during the day and came home to live with young people aged from twelve to nineteen. After that I worked with up to twenty children in a new school in the woods housed in a small old barn and a newly converted building. For my last five years of teaching, I lived in a residential school of international students and staff with the youngest being thirteen. I was one of the oldest being around sixty-five at that time.

Conversation, dialogue formed the ground from which we learnt together. The most human of activities. Informality, openness, genuine affection and humour formed the culture through which we communicated.

It was a culture which recognised the worth of every individual and the absolute necessity of being aware of how we treated each other.

What is so special about intergenerational learning?

It is that there is the potential to understand and experience the passage of time, the movement of life and the meaning of death; and within that is the possibility of a revolution created by thinking together.