An ever increasing number of older people enter the institutions for education and the universities after their active professional life. And ever more frequently the question is heard what the society might gain from these marginalised people who are so eager to learn. One of the most common answers is that they are the predestined conveyors to the generation of their grandchildren for not only the material heritage but also the cultural tradition. However there is a lack of proven forms of cultural conveyance: What should be passed on, how should it be done, and to whom should it be conveyed? Is there a way to structure the conveyance process or is it given by nature?
Within this context the older people involved in this project want to qualify themselves for the conveyance of culture and to develop a method for older people in their postprofessional life to pass on the cultural tradition of their country to people of another culture (intercultural) and to the younger generation (intergenerational).
The elderly involved in the project should gain confidence in dealing with their own culture and with people of other cultures. With the principle ‘Learning by doing’ they will develop two types of building blocks for the conveyance of cultural values: 

One type for the conveyance of every day life culture and one type for the conveyance of literature.
 
The process to be developed must be conveyable to other groups of similar interests.
The results of the project will be stored in a virtual cultural centre, using the new media, and be freely available to other people not involved in the project.
It should be possible to extend the virtual centre with other building blocks for e.g. culture of music, artisanship, history etc.

 

Objectives:
1. Develop and practice a method on how older people can become aware of the everyday culture and of their literary culture that they wish to pass on
2. Develop and practice a method on how Europeans can communicate about these areas of tradition.
3. Develop and practice a method on how older and younger people can communicate about these areas of tradition
4. Develop a method on how to make the results available to other people, not involved in the project, by the means of the new media.

Themes of the learning partnerships:

- the postprofessional tasks of the third generation
- the task of the cultural conveyance
- the intercultural differences in the life of everyday
- the peculiarties of the literature and the specific reading attitude of ones own country and their contrubution to the European understanding
- the possibilities of the new media for the conveyance of cultural values

Approach and method:
We will form two groups of tandem partners.
In the everyday culture group the tandems work on the themes of everyday culture by defining a raster of the most important parts of everyday life and describing commonalities and differences for five areas.
In the tandems of the literature group each partner will choose five authors of its own country, will present them and will describe typicalities of the national culture on the basis of their writings. They accentuate the publications that express the European dimension of their culture or that can be understood as a contribution to the European culture as such.