New Programs on Movies, Gender, and the New Old Age
are now being offered by the developer of The Elderquest
in Today’s Movies and Novels
Delighted by the nationwide success of his 2006 Elderquest
programs (sponsored by the OLLI at the University of Massachusetts,
Boston, partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, originally offered at 19 Lifelong Learning Institutes
around the country, and still running in more than a dozen), developer,
Chuck Nicholas, is pleased to announce a whole new set of programs.
This time they are not grant funded and that means, ironically, that
it will cost a lot less for institutions to run them.
The New Cinema and Literature of Age, Part Two: Men, Women, and
Late Life Relationships unlike Part One, focuses on the battle
to overcome the still dominant narrative of aging as decline, and
it does so in four closely related programs—Men, Women and
the New Old Age, Women and the New Old Age, Men and the New Old Age,
and Late Life Love and Relationships. The first three are based
on the premise that successful aging depends in large measure on the
ability of today’s men and women to overcome ageism and forge
more mature gender identities. The fourth examines the impact that
winning or losing these struggles has on those seeking late life love
and relationships.
Enthusiasm for these new programs is running even higher than expected—150
showed up for our first pilot class at UMass, Boston. We are also
confident that they will charm and enlighten a number of different
kinds of audiences- from LLIs, to Independent Living Facilities, from
those that are already 65 to all those boomers who are about to hit
that still dreaded number. We have also used them to train caregivers
and enlighten family members who need to know what it is really like
to grow old in these early years of the longevity revolution.
All four will maintain, with slight revisions and improvements, the
curricular structures that helped to make Part One such a
resounding success—eight three-hour sessions that combine scholarly
presentations, feature film screenings, readings, and facilitated
discussions of the films and novels, supported by comprehensive film
lists, book lists, and additional readings and references. This time,
however, The Study Guide will be even more extensive
since there are many more movies and novels on this subject.. All
in all there will be 12 different syllabi for the four programs.
Note: A fifth program that consists exclusively of novels will also
be available in three different versions.
To order The Part Two Study Guide which will be
available for distribution in May, in plenty of time to mount the
programs in the Fall, please email Chuck Nicholas at ChuckNicholas@verizon.net
or call him at 978 526 9228. If you are interested in our original
Elderquest program go to www.olli.umb.edu\elderquest
where it can be downloaded or printed out for free.