Waves of Opportunity: Best Practices for Working with Older Adults in Theatre

Introduction

The active aging and older adults (AAOA) classroom provides an environment where instructors must collaborate with students for the learning to be successful. The AAOA classroom is an idiosyncratic pedagogic model that trains new educators, inspires current ones, and addresses changing perceptions of retirement, lifelong learning, and active aging. AAOA learning is assessed immediately through students’ participation, interest, and enthusiasm in coming back to class each week. AAOA courses fill a void: students are able to pursue long-neglected passions, explore new interests, and engage in theoretical discussions. Theatre and film courses are interdisciplinary by nature and particularly effective means of engaging AAOA students due to the creative and cooperative nature of the arts.

Teaching AAOA helps educators acquire tools to create student-centered environments. This includes learning how to create an active classroom, how to manage different personalities, and how to treat students with respect. Working with an AAOA student population and limited funds provides academic freedom and fosters resourcefulness—valuable training for a changing academic environment that benefits continuing education programs and their instructors.

Moreover, there is a growing need for classes for AAOA with the impending “silver tsunami” of aging baby boomers, thus creating a wave of opportunity.¹ Currently, there are 46 million adults over age 65 in the United States, comprising 15 percent of the population. The US Census Bureau projects that there will be 98.2 million adults over age 65 in the country by 2060, constituting 24 percent of the population. In his 2018 book The Longevity Economy, MIT AgeLab founder Joseph Coughlin recommends not ignoring the needs, wants, and desires for new experiences of this growing demographic. The last National Center for Education Statistics’ “Adult Education Survey,” conducted in 2005, indicated that 33 percent of adults over age 55 take formal courses of some kind, and 69 percent of that age cohort participate in informal learning activities. There is an increasing population of older adults who still want to learn. In addition to the dedicated active aging/lifelong learning model, several universities offer free or waived tuition for students on Social Security. Research on active aging and lifelong learning conducted by scholars like Lynn Farquhar, Laura Donorfio and Brian Chapman, Miya Narushima, Jian Liu, and Naomi Diestelkamp, and Miwako Kidahashi and Ronald Manheimer point to the benefits of continuing education for AAOA. Kidahashi and Manheimer also recommend that active aging programs modify their course offerings to accommodate the changing needs of retirement-age individuals, perhaps moving into the realm of professional training (3). Writing about designing curricula for students over age 65, Donorfio and Chapman observe that foremost on the minds of many seniors is the realization that “to age in today’s world means to live longer and work longer . . . our increased life span [is linked] to an increasingly unknown future” (17). Education enhances the quality of life in many ways: attending classes, meeting new people, being receptive to new ideas, and sharing life experiences instill a renewed sense of optimism in many students.

Theatre educators are especially well-suited to engage with AAOA, because of their experience in collaborating with creative professionals, nonprofessionals, and student populations of a wide range of abilities and experiences. Theatre, much like teaching, requires the give and take of all parties to create a dynamic exchange; akin to performers and its audiences, the relationship between teachers and students is symbiotic, and the success of a performance or classroom depends on the engagement of all parties.

Theatre professors are also adept at project management, and theatre is particularly useful to aging populations because of the variety of ways in which it engages with students. Theatre helps AAOA improve physical and mental function through activities such as acting exercises, examining production design, watching or attending performances, reading plays, discussing theatre history and theory, analyzing social contexts and constructs, and working with people with diverse backgrounds on the realization of creative projects.

Despite the rewards of teaching AAOA, however, there are significant challenges. Linda Lau teaches theatre at the Older Adults Program and Contract and...