Week 5

On Monday and Tuesday we translated and compared proverbs in English and Finnish.

On Thursday my original idea was to go through the results of a Grundtvig -project our adult education centre was recently involved with. You see, four different partner countries co-operated in a Grundtvig -project called Memory Matters - The Making of Social History in 2010-2012, and it is interesting to examine what the four partner countries were able to achieve. The Finnish partner -our adult education centre- worked on memory schools for senior participants, and was able to formulate a useful concept. The memory school study groups were established in Suonenjoki and Vesanto, and they had meetings every week for one and a half hours at a time during the study term. Every other meeting was dedicated to tasks intended to activate the brain, and theoretical information on brain functions. In every other meeting the participants concentrated on reminiscing (looking back to sth); for instance, memories connected to their childhood, grandparents, household tasks, school etc. The memories were first written down on paper and then read aloud and tape recorded in class. This way it is possibe to preserve these valuable memories to future generations, and it was actually one of the key objectives in this project to begin with.

The other partner countries involved in this project included Poland, Ireland and England, and next week I thought we could examine what for instance the Irish did within this project. The idea was that all the participants focuced on different things within this project, so for instance the Polish or Irish participants didn't have their own local memory schools, but their preservation of social history was carried out in an entirely different fashion. We'll look into that next week.