GeraBild

Duration: November 2022 – July 2023 and beyond

GeraBild examines the extent to which training in media and digital competence for older target groups is perceived by them as a push or pull offer at educational institutions. We have been examining the geragogical educational programme in 14 educational institutions in the town of Kempten by conducting expert interviews covering the process of planning, implementation and evaluation, each lasting approximately one hour.

According to Kuckartz’ research method of structured content analysis, the 14 interviews are analysed and objectives developed for teaching and learning arrangements of push and pull offers. The deductive categorisation was carried out using the quality wheel with 12 Q-goals in community-oriented senior citizen work and age education (Köster, Schramek & Dorn, 2014). After several coding rounds, successive inductive categories were obtained. The scientifically based analysis gets to the bottom of the hypotheses, providing a transparent result for geragogical development steps:

1. The design dimensions must be specified in order to appropriately assess the quality of educational programmes aimed at gaining media and digital know-how and health and age(ing) skills and to achieve a positive outcome.
2. The geragogically didactic principles with regard to “digital fitness” programmes need expanding, taking into account the content / learning object of digital innovations in a technically and methodologically appropriate manner.
3. There is a need to provide hybrid, low-threshold programmes, with the challenge of establishing suitable didactic principles, such as connection to the real world and experiencing participation, as the basis for developing digital skills.
4. The programme should make a more active contribution to supporting flourishing intergenerational educational and caring communities in which we can prepare ourselves for lifelong learning in a Techno-Anthropocene with the aim of achieving this in an age-appropriate and evolutionary way. This requires appropriate situations for acquiring socio-communicative and personal skills.
5. The teaching/learning arrangements should include tasks and training situations for intergenerational learning. This calls for the creation of spaces for educational processes that enable analysis and synthesis of ambivalences towards analogue and digital technology on the basis of life and learning biographies.