Supporting Campus Civic Engagement Around Wisdom and Older People
Ricca Edmondson (NUI Galway)
Abstract
This paper reports on a course given at the National University of Ireland, Galway on ageing, older people and wisdom. This seminar-based, elective course was specifically adapted to explore and support the idea of campus civic engagement, an aim embraced with enthusiasm by its students. The course took a life-course-based approach to the processes and goals involved in human lifetimes, combining an introduction to social gerontology with lesser-known historical and contemporary work on the idea of wisdom. The idea of wisdom used, until the twentieth century, to be considered central to understanding human education and ageing; while wisdom was not expected to be achieved by everyone, the attempt to come closer to it both gave a point to the process of maturation and offered potential social roles for older people. In principle, therefore, this idea also offers guiding principles for lifelong learning and reasons for interaction between people on and off campus. Students explored cases of wisdom and continued learning they detected among older people outside the university and worked very creatively with the experiences they encountered. Nonetheless, this attempt to create a seamless overlap between on- and off-campus engagement was not without its problems; the paper examines these and interrogates possible solutions.
