AEA DIGEST Association for Education and Ageing Issue no 19 Spring 2007 FROM THE CHAIR….. Jo Walker Another conference and AGM are upon If you are a member planning to come to us! The opportunity to work with our Eric’s lecture and the AGM that follows, friends at Birkbeck University of please arrive at 2.45pm – further details London was too good to pass up, so our are in your AGM invitation. If you annual conference this year will be would like to come to the whole day, 22nd-23rd March in Bloomsbury, under please register with Birkbeck, who are the title ‘Learning for the Lifecourse’. handling the administration for us. You will have had details from Carol Contact them at [email protected] and we hope to see you there, especially or use the form that Carol has on the Friday 23rd March, when the distributed. programme is particularly about later life learning. Publication of last year’s memorial lecture by Professor Brian Groombridge Friday’s programme will also include is underway, through NIACE, for whose the Frank Glendenning Memorial support we are grateful. This will be Lecture, which is to be given this year available in May; it will be launched at by Dr Eric Midwinter. Eric is currently an AEA session within a conference in chair of the Centre for Policy on Ageing, Glasgow to celebrate 20 years of later but has been prominently involved in life learning at Strathclyde University. older adults’ learning for many years, ‘A Legacy of Learning’ will be held 9th- not least through the birth of the 11th May at the Senior Studies Institute. University of the Third Age in this If you would like further details of the country. He remembers Frank conference, contact them at particularly through AEA and the Beth www.cll.strath.ac.uk/legacy/index.htm Johnson Foundation in Staffordshire. 2 Our ‘capacity building’ project is well the nearby town of Vammala (south west underway, funded by the Esmee Finland), Italy, Slovenia, and the UK. Fairbairn Foundation. Our consultant The local people invited us into their has contacted a representative range of community centre, the former village people who have an interest in AEA and school, warmed by traditional wood the Executive Committee has had a burning stoves. Soon we were making recent away day to consider the views Valentine cards out of raw flax and hand collected so far and to agree the made card while, using their English, foundations of strategic and business Enni and the other children acted as plans. When these plans are finalised we interpreters. will be in a good position to approach Back in the education centre in funding agencies for support for Vammala, the crafts being practiced development work of various kinds. were more varied and skilful but still using simple materials: basket making, I look forward to seeing you at the quilting, Viking jewellery making, conference / lecture / AGM and to being felting and others, but again the in touch through another year. generations were well mixed. This was ------------------------------------------------- an international episode in the In February, Brian Groombridge went intergenerational projects developed in to Finland with an Educational Centres the four countries over the last three Association team to take part in the EU- years. Funded by the EU’s Grundtvig funded 'Teddy Bear' project, bringing Programme, administered here by the older people together with some very British Council, supporting the adult much younger. He tells us here about learning work of the Educational Centres his Vammala Experience Association. Each country’s project has a different focus - rural crafts in The temperature was about minus 30°C. Vammala; reminiscence work in The snow was deep and crisp and even, Herefordshire, Stoke and Wedgwood and several of us enjoyed standing or College; mobile phone and computer use sitting on kick sledges and sliding down in Italy (even working with people with the slope outside the village hall. incipient dementia). They are learning Pushing back up was harder work, so I from each other, acquiring a better stopped and talked to a member of the understanding of what kinds of joint welcome party with a lovely smile. educational activity can be successfully ‘Could you tell me what this sledge is undertaken by people of very different called in Finnish?’, I asked. She replied: ages. Slovenian colleagues are now ‘Yes. It’s called a Potkukelkka. Shall I planning a project in the same co- write it down for you?’. She wrote the operative spirit. word in my notebook and we exchanged The Vammala college provides a wide names: ‘I’m Brian’ and ‘I’m Enni’. range of adult education courses, Enni was ten years old. She was there particularly strong in music and drama, with two older brothers, several other computer training for older people, and children, many older people, some very Open University courses (in alliance old, and a craft tutor, all from Lantula, a with the universities of Tampere and village of 200 inhabitants. We were Turku). With help from a professional adult educators and social workers from interpreter, we also took part in a one- 3 day conference for craft tutors. It was adopted in my term of office, and I shall opened by the college principal, a follow it up wearing several hats, musician who continued the rural craft including my special interest in Future theme by calling the meeting to order Studies. In Helsinki I took the with a goat’s horn. The programme was opportunity to renew contact with varied: an ebullient woman with a Finnish friends and colleagues whose lifetime’s experience as a milliner work includes linking the arts, health reminisced; an academic from the and education in later life (the theme of University of Turku Centre for Future my Frank Glendenning Memorial for the Research, explained the need to plan AEA last summer). ECA colleagues led education with changing demography, by Chairman Bernard Godding working skills requirements and other major with the other three Teddy Bear teams factors in mind. ended the week by planning the next I am not directly part of the Teddy Bear phase of the work. I came home with a team, so it was a privilege for me to be card thanking me in English for my visit, at this event. I went as the ECA’s made by Enni and one of her senior President Emeritus; the project was assistants. Brian Groombridge and young Enni enjoy an intergenerational discussion at Vammala 4 Eleven years ago at the age of 50 work he did as a Principal. I could William Tyler downshifted in his career empathise with that. from being a College Principal and became a freelance worker in the field of I began on the 1st January with little in Adult Education. He writes here about the way of work but with a great weight his reasons and the pros and cons of lifted from my shoulders. I began to Downshifting. network like frenzy. The work began to come in, some reasonably paid and some I remember at the time some of my definitely not. But at this stage I simply colleagues envied me, others thought me wanted people to know that I was on the misguided. market. I even agreed to appear as the ‘Tea at Three’ guest on the local BBC Why did I downshift? Overwhelmingly Radio Station. for health reasons. I felt after over 20 years in senior positions that I had had My wife and I have survived, both enough. My health wasn’t good and financially and as a couple. The last is when the college doctor began to no joking matter as having the husband question the wisdom of soldiering on to at home everyday can place a strain on 65 or even 60, I knew I had to take any marriage. We’ve both enjoyed the notice. last ten years, and reckon now that our lives would have been much less Of course, there were other reasons too, interesting had I continued in post. the most important being how disillusioned I had become with the way In terms of work I would have missed that Government was treating Adult out on meeting such a wonderful Education. I felt desperately out of assortment of people and doing a wide sympathy with the prevailing emphasis selection of tasks, ranging from being a on the utilitarian argument for education. professional witness for an adult student This was a long way from my own suing her university to designing a beliefs and experience of education in folklore poster for The Foreign Office general and of adult education in and doing a consultancy on an academic particular. library. After a lot of soul searching the answer My advice to others is now simple – was obvious - Get out. Thus, having Don’t let your life drift away. Make a offered my resignation in the June, I was decision in your late forties or early out of the college by the end of that fifties on how you want to spend the December. First lesson of freelance life next part of your life. You may choose was soon learned. No one owes you to keep working in your chosen field, anything, and what you have been and you may opt for a second and totally achieved counts for nothing. A great different career, you may choose to adult educator, for whom I worked in the retire early or like me, you may choose early part of my career, was prone to say to downshift within your chosen that when teaching or researching he was profession.