Teaching - A Job, A Lifestyle, A Story: Possibilities and Limitations of an Intergenerational Oral History Project

In the United States, the natural process of growing old is met with fear by the majority of the population, a fear, according to Tamara M. Valentine (2004), of "the imminent loneliness, senility, dependency, inactivity, ill health, and sagging bodies associated with advanced aging" (p. 180). From language which names elderly woman as hags and biddies and men as coots and geezers to pop culture depictions of the aged in films such as Grumpy Old Men and slogans for TV commercials such as "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!," discrimination against this ever-growing segment of the population demands attention. Studies in psychology claim that 30-60 percent of elderly persons experience at least one episode of depression significant enough to interfere with their daily activities (Solomon cited in Robinson, 2004, p. 194) and estimate the rate of suicide among the aged as the highest of all age groups (Robinson, 2004, p. 194). Although aging might seem far away from many of them, U.S. students grow up within a youth-worshipping culture and should understand how and why they have been conditioned to desire eternal youth and the ramifications of this ideology for their grandparents, parents, and future selves. How can teachers engage students in conversations about the aging process in classrooms to both call the negative stereotypes of the elderly into question and to help students negotiate their own, although distant, confrontation with growing old? The author describes her use of an intergenerational oral history project to model how service-learning pedagogy in a university writing classroom may respond to this need.