An inspiring talk with Marina Gonzalez

New oceans for managers: designing courses for older adults

In this session Marina Gonzalez shares her thoughts and ideas about the challenges and different learnings from implementing foreign language courses for Older Adults at university. The speaker believes that developing a curriculum that applies critical foreign language geragogy (CFLG) and training teachers with an emphasis on emotions represent the issues such an innovative program should explore to satisfy the needs of this specific segment of the population. 

Marina worked in different programmes at least for 5 years in univercity settings. And the issue of her talk is the present situation of that programmes. She described three concepts that she wanted to put into tention there. The concept of oceans (that comes from marketing) - when you reach new areas that have not been explored yet. You might think that all settings about teaching have been already described, such as teaching children, teaching adults, language schools, etc.  Nevertheless, Marina Gonzalez says: There are a number of "oceans". In fact, that's why she decided to talk about one of these "oceans" connected with Older Adults.

Her speech is full of interesting ideas about generations, people in general, people's age, education, etc. Older Adult education is the theme that she tried to discuss. She explained this with the help of Univercity of the Third Age, the movement which changed into the network in universities.

The whole speech was dynamic and informative. Marina Gonzalez prepared different diagrams that helped viewers and listeners to visualize new information. She also answered to some questions that showed viewers' involvement to the session. All of it made me think about the situation in Russia and I'd like to learn more about it.