Education in civic participation: Children, seniors and the challenges of an intergenerational information and communications technology program

Abstract

This article investigates an intergenerational information and communications technology (ICT) program that seeks expressly to enhance children's civic participation by placing them in mutually educational encounters with seniors. Applying Devine's model of the interrelationship among structure, power, and agency, it problematizes this goal by analyzing the dialectics of the power relations between seniors and children who maintain a technology-driven relationship. The data were gathered via qualitative participant-observation in two elementary schools. The results reveal clashing implications for children's empowerment as computer "teachers" and their experiencing of agency. Implementation of Devine's theoretical model sheds light on the meanings of the stereotyped terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," as well as on the a-stereotyped senior's identity as "digital consumers." The conclusions suggest that the technological gap may not be definitive in confirming young people's supremacy in the generational hierarchy, signaling the need for caution in handling this gap via civic empowerment in an educational setting.

Promoting Media Literacy Among Older People: A Systematic Review

“…Seven articles were coded in the category “create.” Even though some of these articles also included coding in the “use” category, their emphasis was on participants’ creative content-production processes, and the use of digital tools was only secondary to that aim. These articles reported on interventions in which older people created their life histories in various formats, such as in a Word file (Gamliel, 2016), a film (Manchester & Facer, 2015), or on DVD and via photo exhibition (Del Prete et al, 2011). One article (Heydon, 2011) reported on an intervention where participants created multimodal presentations of special things and places.…”

“…However, two studies reported problems related to intergenerational teaching approaches. These studies reported that the teaching strategies of the young tutors were inadequate (Gamliel, 2016; Tambaum, 2017) and some of the participating tutors were unsatisfied with their tasks and wanted to quit before the end of the intergenerational program (Gamliel, 2016).…”

Family Conflicts and Technology Use: The Voices of Grandmothers

“…Research has shown that ICT has reshaped family relational patterns, and new technologies challenge traditional family practices (Haddon & Mante-Meijer, 2016;Stafford & Hillyer, 2012). The way families incorporate and use ICT in intergenerational contexts has become a prominent topic of research over the past few years (Gamliel, 2017;Ouellet et al, 2017;Taipale et al, 2018). The process of domestication of ICT (i.e., the way family incorporate the new technologies and offer them meaning) has gained researchers' attention.…”

Untitled

“…Various media literacy education methods have been applied in supporting older people to use, understand, and create media content and communications. The methods include traditional approaches, such as fixed-length instructor-led courses (e.g., Castilla et al, 2018), learner-centered one-on-one tutoring (e.g., Brown & Strommen, 2018), peer-to-peer teaching (e.g., Sayago, Forbes, & Blat, 2013), intergenerational approaches where significantly younger persons have tutored the seniors (e.g., Gamliel, 2017), and creative pedagogies based on older people's creative content production processes (e.g., Manchester & Facer, 2015). In addition, blended learning and online learning approaches have been used for promoting older people's media literacies (e.g., Manafo & Wong, 2012).…”