Unit 5: Creative Ageing - Opportunities and Outlook
11. Community Links
Step A
As you will have seen throughout this course, providing quality care requires a comprehensive skills set, and yet you may, at times, be unsure of whether you are doing ‘the right thing’. Maybe the training you received was more task-focussed and covered the basics, such as manual handling and safeguarding. You may not consider yourself to be a linguist, a teacher, and maybe English is not your first language.
However confident you may be feeling in your role as a carer, we want to encourage you to link with local initiatives and develop some ideas how you can take your language teaching work beyond your own care setting to create an even bigger impact with your expertise, for example in-between learning with your senior learner/s. This will be a good way of continuing the momentum you started in doing this course. You could do the following:
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Explore the Dementia in Scotland magazine published by Alzheimer Scotland since spring 2011.
Start by scanning the last three or four issues and take some notes in your learning diary of initiatives, people, ideas that inspire you.
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Now watch six short videos featuring interviews - Meet the winners from Scotland’s Dementia Awards 2017. Also, have a look at the nominated initiatives for the six awards here.
Take some notes while watching the videos on the focus of the initiatives presented, how these came about and any impact these initiatives have had.
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Finally, search for Dementia-friendly initiatives in your area (or beyond) and find out about the work they do. You can make a start by finding out what is going on in your local area through the Alzheimer Scotland website: You may also want to have a look at these initiatives:
Have you found any initiative that inspired you? Did you see any initiative you think you could link up with as a carer or care worker? Was there any initiative that you feel could benefit from a language-angle?
- If you have come across other initiatives that you feel would be suited to doing some language-and-culture-related work with you, please mention this and say what kind of work you could envisage doing together.
Step B
This is a community initiative in Glasgow run by native speakers of Spanish who have moved to Glasgow and are keen to introduce people in the city to the Spanish language as well as the cultures in Spanish-speaking countries across the world where they have come from. The activities of La Biciteca are aimed at children and families. They involve outdoor learning and incorporate storytelling, drama, puppet making and many other creative activities. The little library of children’s books in Spanish also travels around Glasgow’s primary schools and nurseries and has generated a lot of interest since it was founded in 2015.In autumn 2017, La Biciteca relaunched and the mobile library was created from some pieces of wood, a bicycle and paint.
1. Watch this video of the work La Biciteca is doing. This video shows some storytelling with puppets at a summer festival in Glasgow.
2. Take notes in your learning log of how they present Spanish language and culture in their sessions.
- Do the La Biciteca members ‘teach’ language as such?
- What tools/props do they use for their sessions?
Compare your answer to our model answer
3. As a second step, watch the video again and think about the following questions:
- Are there any ideas or strategies presented in the video which you might want to try out in a language learning session with your senior learner/s?
- How could you use this way of storytelling in your teaching?
Either develop a concrete idea for a short teaching sequence or mention some more general thoughts on storytelling in care work sessions. Then compare your answer with our model answer.