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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
In an increasingly aging world, the effort to prepare future professionals for work with older persons starts to be a concern of higher education institutions. This article comments on the importance of experiential learning for preparing Social Education students to intervene with older people and presents an activity piloted at a Polytechnic University of Portugal. About 40 older persons from nursing homes came to a class in order to experiment the games developed during previous classes by the students. In order to understand the benefits of experimenting the games with older persons for the students, 37 students have answered a questionnaire about the importance of this learning activity. Findings on their assessment showed that the experience was generally positive, with all students rating as very important/important for their learning. Through open-ended questions the most mentioned benefits of the activity were the opportunity to social interact, to have contact with older persons, to develop in practice something theoretically conceived in the classroom, and to stimulate older persons. Through closed-ended questions the level of accordance with the pedagogical aims of the activity were very high, with 32 (86.5%) totally agreeing that it served to interact with older persons and 24 (64.9%) agreeing that the activity made them to realize if they like this area of intervention. The authors describe the impact this kind of activity may have on the knowledge about older persons, skills for motivating a group activity and also students’ beliefs, attitudes, and values related to working with older adults.
Description
Keywords
social education older people games experiential learning
Citation
Publisher
Universidade da Coruña, Servizo de Publicacións