Lime Project

Please note on 1st October 2006 the Community Access Programme became the REAP: Researching Equity, Access and Participation Group. This is an archive site. Please click link to go to the REAP Website.

Background

Community Access Programme is a research and development unit based in Lancaster University’s Department of Educational Research. CAP is committed to working in partnership with organisations in the voluntary and statutory sectors that share our vision of developing and delivering inclusive, culturally and socially relevant lifelong learning opportunities.

LIME contributed to Lancashire County Council’s Adult and Community Programme of Family Learning. It worked to extend understanding about the factors that contribute or inhibit intergenerational and multicultural learning. It complemented our African Caribbean and Asian Curriculum Project (ACA).

For copies of the LIME research reports or to discuss staff development to support the delivery of family learning please contact Ann-Marie Houghton

Aims

• To investigate how intergenerational and multicultural learning opportunities contributes towards developing community cohesion.
• To identify issues associated with fostering intergenerational and multicultural education.
• To explore how members of the family influence and are involved in the learning process.
• To develop a range of culturally, socially relevant learning opportunities targeted at different members of the family and delivered in partnership with a range of different organisations.

Activities

The LIME project developed activities specifically for:

• Personal skills for family learning
• An opportunity for parents to build their confidence and recognise how their skills can be used to support learning in the family
• Families and Higher Education Decision-making
• Enterprising fun for all the family
• Learning from others in our community
• Looking at me and Looking at my community
• Me and My Family
• Library fun for all the family

Celebration of Family Learning

The celebration of family learning was attended by 150 participants including children, parents and grandparents who belonged to five different community groups in Burnley and Preston.

The day included four workshops and four interactive campus tours, with all families taking part in two workshops and an interactive campus tour. These included:

• Fruits of the world – Learning using our senses
• Stories and songs around the world
• Learning together – collage of family learning
• Computers and family learning
• Learning from the environment – Campus Tour
• A big board family quiz – Campus Tour
• A collaborative family challenge – Campus Tour
• Learning about other faiths – Campus Tour

Each workshop aimed to celebrate diversity and enable different participants to share their experiences with others. The interactive and practical focus of workshops allowed participants of all ages to join in, some of the highlights include:

• Sharing family stories as well as stories from around the world, translations of stories told by children so that older adults with limited English were able to participate. A parent from Sahara commented “I was so pleased to see my children go to the front of the group and share a fairy tale story – it was wonderful to see the confidence in them” Children were encouraged to listen to an elder from Gujarat Hindu Society recalling their arrival in England which generated discussion about how things have changed.
• The hands and family collage provided an informal mechanism for obtaining information from participants as well as encouraging everyone to support each other. The presumption that adults might need to help children cut out their hands was not always the case. The chance for comments in other languages encouraged on lookers to take a more active part.
• As might be expected young people played a key role in encouraging reluctant adults to have a go on the computer.

Several parents commented on intergenerational interaction, and one Hindu man said, 'I am very pleased to be here today, it has been a wonderful day, there should be more days like this organised….when I went to the computer workshop, it was so good to see the young people helping their grandparents work the computer … we help them at home and teach them cultural values, and today they had a chance to teach their elders something… this is how it should be…thank you for inviting us.'

The Big Board family quiz was an example of how learners on one of the ACA courses Engaging Community Learners developed a quiz as part of their course. As their tutor explained, ‘I was so pleased for the women, it was great for them to see their quiz being used as part of this family learning day, and because they are parents themselves they could make up a quiz that they knew from experience would be suitable’. And one of the women who helped to make the game said I felt proud that my children joined in the game which I had a part in designing.

The Chaplaincy Tour that was designed to encourage an exchange between people of different faiths was very positive, although not solely as a result of the activities provided. As their tour guide reported, there was not as much interaction between the older and younger people during the chaplaincy exercise as many of the elders were tired. However the elders between themselves talked and shared stories, one particular man was using the posters on Hinduism to explain his religion to a Muslim lady. The younger children were also very happy to colour in symbols of other religions, and were keen to take their pieces of work home with them. One parent had a distressed child – there was an overseas student playing the violin in one of the chapels, and she took her child in there. Her child was transfixed by the music and calmed down immediately – this was the first time her child had seen somebody play a classical musical instrument live. It is certainly worth remembering that often learning within the family happens at the least expected times.

All families were assigned to a university college for the day; the families from each community group were split up to encourage interaction and informal learning between the families. This seems to have been effective as one Burnley Muslim woman explained, ‘at the beginning I thought it looked like a cricket match where all the Pakistani families were on one side and the Indian (families) were on the other, but by the end of the day we were all mixed up, you could see how people were all mixed and sitting together’. In addition there was an informal learning of words from another language, an exchange of childhood experiences and comparison of life in their respective communities.

There were a number of practical lessons learned as a result of this large scale intergenerational and multicultural day, some which will be taken forward, for instance building in more ‘free time’ and allocating to groups before the event.