03 Dec Faculty Seminars: Cultivating Innovation through Intergenerational Wisdom
On Thursday, May 12, 2016, along with several other Vanderbilt faculty members, I will discuss my research and current passion, titled, “Cultivating Innovation through Intergenerational Wisdom” at the Faculty Seminars event during the 2016 Commencement open to graduates, families and guests. For those attending, there will be an open Q&A session for the last 15 minutes of each session.
I am looking forward to talking about two programs that I developed out of my research. The Wisdom Working Group (WWG) is rooted in the idea that older adults are lifelong innovators and experiential researchers whose informal findings can prove invaluable to Vanderbilt’s project of solving “problems of importance to society” through discovery and learning. Voices from Our America (VFOA) is a publicly engaged research project dedicated to collecting, preserving, and disseminating forgotten, hidden, or unknown stories of American experience. We believe that the story of America, and of any particular nation within America, cannot be truly captured and told if so many voices are left out.
The methodology I’m encouraging is to recognize each and every person as having knowledge and having capacity for being innovative. If you have lived past 65 – you’ve got some knowledge that the rest of us need to know. That we need to understand – especially if you’ve lived past 65 and can still smile and love. I’m interested in the pathbreakers, pioneers, preservers. You know that older woman in your neighborhood who has all the newspaper clippings from all the way back? That’s the person whose story I think we should have.
I would like for everyone to learn and benefit from the wisdom of the elders. So, I wanted to find an innovative way to integrate that knowledge into what’s going on at schools, because then we can really benefit from that wisdom – as not everyone has a grandparent to pass along that wisdom to them. How can we integrate the wisdom of the elders into the newer generations on multiple levels? These programs are part of the answer and I’m looking forward to sharing more.
Please click here for further details about the seminar.
(A live recording of the seminar has now been posted here.)