Over the past six months, the Homeplaces project, a collaboration between PhotoWings, a not-for-profit organisation based in San Francisco and the Intergenerational Learning Programme in Dublin City University, has been piloted for Transition Year students in 2 Dublin secondary schools.
The goal has been to connect generations through sharing photographs and stories. Dr Cathy Fowley, with the help of Lara Roche, 2nd year Multimedia student in the School of Communication, is currently finalising a digital toolkit to connect 4th year transition year students with their grandparents’ generation. Our aim is that students all over Ireland can utilise the toolkit to bring the generations closer together.
Last Tuesday, we were treated to a viewing of the first pilot with local participating transition year students from St. Aidan’s Community College and the Dominican College , accompanied by two of their teachers. Christine, Carmel, Joan and Mary, are all ILP participants, who had been interviewed by the young students. They joined us to see how the project was progressing.
Cathy gave everybody a warm welcome and introduced us all to the project.
Dr. Trudy Corrigan gave us an insight into the work of Intergenerational Learning Programme and the project, and the students then introduced their projects and talked about how much they enjoyed the process. Although they had technical issues shooting, saving, editing and uploading their projects, the stories they heard and shared far outweighed these initial teething problems.
Christine’s photographs and stories about the mill where she used to live is one example of the young students’ work.
intergenerational learning programme dcu 
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