The Monthly discusses the Translating Age project with Tess Maginess from Queen’s University – Part 3 – More on the process of facilitating the Translating Age project

Tell us more about the project?

We did have a structured process of workshops. We had Louise McIvor as a writing facilitator and Karen Kinghan, who I mentioned earlier, as the film facilitator. Dr Frederica Ferrieri did the website design.

We have a long history here at the Open Learning Programme of working with all sorts of different groups, including groups who were working on Peacebuilding, and on other key issues of our time, including ageing and mental health.

We use the process of active learning, so it isn’t a process of passive learning where the teacher is the expert and they offer you information which you later regurgitate for an exam or something similar to that. We value the experience, the learning of, in this case, the older people we were working with, and we want to allow them to use their experience and to filter that through to the other participants and to the work that they produce for the project.

We set up the workshops in the morning and in the evening, so that we could reflect the reality of the women’s lives; so the project was set up to meet the realities of the women’s lives, rather than being inflexible. There was also an element of informality about the workshops, and we took the time to allow the participants to develop relationships with each other so that they could share information with them. That might be called building a community of practice. We were very careful with people’s privacy, especially given that some of the stories we were hearing, inevitably, involved trauma.

What would you say were the outcomes of the project?

We created the website because we didn’t want a situation to arise where the only way you could learn about this project was to read an academic article, which is fine, but projects need to have wider impact in the community.  That is part of what civic engagement means, I think. We wanted something accessible, and we did that with our previous projects, and something that could be easily navigated. We were very lucky to have Dr Frederica Ferrieri who developed the website using the Queen’s template, which was also quite a learning curve.

As we went along we were able to drop the content for the website in, from the origins of the project, how the project was structured, why we did it, how we did it, and then we added the lovely artwork of the women as well.

There is a documentary on the website about the project, and we also have information from the two launches we organised. And they were wonderful evenings where the women could celebrate their achievements. And we were able to accommodate all the needs of the participants, travel, dietary needs at the launches, we helped with other needs specific to older women. It is all well and good offering people a free course if they, because of a series of special needs, can’t access that course.

I think it is worth adding that we were very privileged with both the work of the facilitators and the participants, the energy, the extra hours people put in, all of those things which might not normally get mentioned, all of that work which allowed us to complete a wonderful project.

Have you any final thoughts?

I don’t think we are saying that what we have done with the Translating Age project is in any way a model of best practice, but what we can say is this is the way we did it, this is what came out of the project, it is all available to view on the website, and we think it is worth looking into.

We have written and published academic papers about previous projects and would hope to do the same wit this one, since that can influence policy related to how we support older women migrants.

I know people could look at the project and I am sure they could say that we could have done things differently, and of course there can always be criticisms, especially in Academia, but I think there is plenty of very useful learning to come out of this particular project. I might say also, that there is plenty of useful learning which emerged from the work of the Open Learning Programme over the years.

Where to Now?

Well I am retiring soon so although I might be involved in future projects as a volunteer, I won’t be working on those projects as part of my employment. I am hoping there will be another project which emerges from Translating Age and I think, regardless of personnel, we should find a way to get something up and running. If something is worth doing, and this Translating Age project was certainly worth doing, then we need to find a way to do it.