Description
Polish society is aging, but there is still lack of projects aimed at seniors. The goal of the project is to activate seniors from Pomerania - socially and digitally - through informal education. The stories of the seniors evolving around women working in Gdańsk Shipyard (dual exclusion of women) will be registered, and photographs and documents for mobile application and publication will be archived. The seniors will master indispensable skills during the workshops. Project outcomes will be as follows: mobile application, audio broadcasts, interviews, alternative tourism in the form of walks through the old shipyard brownfields with seniors as guides (career activation is not the goal). Project will be implemented in partnership with the Urban Culture Institute, the Iceland National Library Women's History Archive, and Oslo and Akershus University College. International partners will organise and conduct workshops of her-story (women's history), storytelling and archiving. The Urban Culture Institute will provide technical and organisational support.
Summary of project results
"Polish society grows old, and the scale of social exclusion increases with age (Report Social Watch, 2010). In Pomerania one of the most excluded ar retired workers of the Gdańsk Shipyard - a symbol of the socio-political transformation, and formerly a place of work of tens of thousands people, including even 5,000 women. At present, these retired women are victims of a double exclusion - as a senior and a woman. They became invisible. Their professional merit and activities for democratization of the society are ignored. The aim of the project was to counteract the exclusion of the seniors - former workers of the Shipyard - through their stimulation on social and digital ground (informal education and common activities for recording and publicizing information about women's work in the Gdańsk Shipyard). Thanks to the project realization 542 seniors engaged in collecting and publicizing information about women's work in the Gdańsk Shipyard (oral history). 341 persons took part in the workshops on computer and internet skills, and 201 persons took part in the thematic workshops (storytelling, conducting interviews, digital social archives, mobile application development, art therapy, guide course). 60 persons actively engaged in development of the project's products. 40 interviews with the Shipyard workers have been recorded. They were the basis of four radio plays. A sightseeing route was created, 60 walks were conducted in the former shipyard. A mobile app was developed for people visiting the Shipyard and a publication with collected materials supplemented with methodological texts on usage of oral history for activities supporting excluded groups. Beneficiaries of the project were 542 seniors from Gdańsk and its environs. Partners of the project were: The City Culture Institute (implementation of the project and substantial in organising the walks), Women's History Archives of the National Library of Iceland (workshops on story crafing based on biographical material); as well a representative of the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences conducted workshops on storytelling."
Summary of bilateral results
One person from Icelandic partner and one from Norwegian have come twice to Gdansk. Thanks to these meeting we share our knowledge and talked about how we can use it in different cultural contexts. Representatives of our partners contribiute to the project mostly with their knowledge about storytelling – how to work with stories and how to share them. It is an unusual perspective in Poland. Storytelling is often use in business, not in cultural or social projects. We have found out about similar women's history project in Iceland in Norway what means the possibilty of the further cooperation. Despite differencies between our cultures we can and want to work together