Abstract:

The idoSOS (elderly) - intertwined voices project began in September 2020, within the Education and Training Research Centre of the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (ESE-IPS).

The IPS Campus includes four schools with different formative valences in a contiguous space, in a peripheral area of the city, about 4km from it, in a semi-urban environment. On its left side there is an eminently rural area and on the right side a more urban area. This peripheral dwelling determines that the students, except for the links created with the institutions through the internships, live mainly inside the Campus, with a tenuous connection to the Community.

Obviously, there are multiple attempts to prevent this, one of which is the existence of a Curricular Unit in all ESE-IPS degrees, called Competences Portfolio, in which, among other things, volunteering is encouraged.

It is also within this logic of encouraging the participation of young people that this project was created at a very particular moment, such as the Pandemic caused by SARS-Cov-2.

It was successfully submitted to an application of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal with funding from Santander Bank for projects that seek to respond to the problems caused by the Pandemic.

This project aimed to investigate effective intergenerational strategies to break the social isolation of the elderly population, to value them and to reinforce their capacity to face emergency situations, especially in the context of pandemics that affect this age group in particular.

With the methodology that was adopted, it was sought to create channels for dialogue and encounters between young people and the elderly, which would result in empathic processes of support and mutual learning.

Regarding young students, it was expected that they would also develop a set of transversal skills, useful for their formation, namely that they would feel part of this Community and, consequently, this would contribute to their social and civic awareness.

The young participants were all students of the degree in Sociocultural Animation and Intervention, mainly from the 2nd and 3rd year of the course, who, on their own initiative, enrolled after the volunteer scholarship was announced.

The elderly are users of two day care centres in the municipality of Setúbal, one in rural and one in urban areas.

Throughout the 2020/21 school year, several intervention strategies were created with a purpose to establishing, above all, the connection of a pair (student/elderly), as well as others that enhanced the sharing between the group as a whole teachers, students, elderly people).

The supervision of these practices was done using regular monitoring meetings and key moments for the application of questionnaires and interviews to both the students and the elderly.

In this particular presentation, we will focus on the intergenerational learning that stemmed from the interpersonal relationship between the young/elderly pair and how this broadened their perspective of the Community and promoted skills related to their area of academic formation.

Keywords:

Community, Participation, intergenerationality.