Launched in 2021 by a team of undergraduate students, university faculty, associate researchers, and community partners collaborating as genuine equals in a diverse team, the Together Time Story Sacks intergenerational literacies program forms part of an ongoing action research project aimed at understanding and addressing barriers that residents…

This paper presents findings from a small-scale pilot evaluation of the Silver Stories programme. Silver Stories involves school-age children reading to older people in the community and is a way of addressing literacy and emotional difficulties, as well as enhancing wellbeing. The authors collected and analysed questionnaire and interview data…

Play is traditionally considered the foundation of learning in the early years. Because play is characterized by free choice, it can be difficult for adults to ensure all learning is useful for children. The intervention described here took a novel approach to this problematic. It exposed 17 four-year-olds to different adult demonstrations to see…

This research describes some of the salient features of Indigenous ways of working with multimodal literacies in digital contexts of use that emerged within an Indigenous school community with the oversight of Aboriginal Elders. This is significant because the use of multimodal literacy practices among a growing number of Indigenous school…

This exploratory case study integrated digital media into an intergenerational art class. Its goals were to generate knowledge of how to bring young children and elders together to expand their opportunities for meaning-making and seeing themselves in affirming ways so as to generate transferable understanding of digitally enhanced multimodal…

This publication demonstrates the potential of dynamic literate environments and the importance of nurturing a culture of reading and writing, examining four different contexts: digital environments, intergenerational settings, community libraries and prisons. The case studies, from UNESCO's Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database…

Intergenerational learning activities benefit both older and younger participants. The Whyalla Men's Shed (WMS) not only meets many of the needs of its older participants but has recently become involved in several initiatives that foster intergenerational collaboration and learning. An agreement between the University of South Australia (UniSA)…

This naturalistic study reports the language and literacy-learning opportunities, and the conditions necessary to bring them about, in the art component of an innovative intergenerational programme. The focus is on the children in the programme (median age 4), their interaction with adult participants (median age 85) and facilitators, and the ways…

Examines the effects of an intergenerational literacy program on the measured English proficiency of nine bilingual families. Finds significant increases in the families' measured second-language facility. Proposes that teacher scaffolding strategies, as well as parents' and children's efforts to linguistically mediate each other's learning, were…

A study investigated the impact of an intergenerational approach on: (1) the literacy development and literacy use of adult learners enrolled in an adult basic education program; and (2) the emergent and developing literacy of their children. The project is one of several that have been implemented under the Boston University/Chelsea Public…