The COST network funded by the European Commission on Ageism -  a multi-national, interdisciplinary perspective (IS1402), provides opportunities for short scientific missions and in February 2018  one of these brought me Glasgow hosted by CR&DALL in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Days in the UoG Library gave to me some answers to the question: Can we talk about ageism in intergenerational practice and learning endeavours? In addition to that many contacts with Glasgow local practitioners directed me to the new research ideas and questions.
Ageism towards older people is a relatively unresearched topic. The same applies to intergenerational learning (IGL) and issues related to the inclusion of older men. It therefore was interesting to bring all these three components onto one table. The jump into academic literature first revealed that instead of ageism we should be more focused on age segregation.   Regrettably older people’s segregation has seen more as a benefit (Hagestad & Uhlenberg, 2005), which is rather opposite to that emphasised in the theory of intergenerational practice (IGP). It is widely documented and acknowledged that older women are more organised than older men, there are more age and sex segregated organisations for older women. In the context of IGP it means that older men have structurally less opportunities to be engaged in top-down and bottom-up IGP initiatives between age segregated institutions. Therefore, we really can talk about intersectional discrimination (ageism on more than one ground) within intergenerational practice (IGP).

The question about possible intersectional discrimination (age: old; gender: male) in organizations and undertakings that are not formally age segregated needs to be explored. My question is to what extent  community and hobbies-based activities meet the criteria of IGP and IGL. For example churches are open for people at all ages, but activities tend to be segregated by age – juniors have their Sunday schools and summer camps, and senior members tend to have their own meetings. First steps towards the answer were taken in Glasgow.

The Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre is a professional  theatre performing classic and contemporary plays. But the theatre has a long history in community projects and community production as well. All citizens available in the middle of a day can drop in and take part in a community collective event or community play rehearsals. During my observations at the Citizens Theatre, I met a young piano player John, a retired Janey, an unemployed middlage Harry, a young housewife Maria and many other participants. Louise Brown, Elly Goodman and Neil Packham from Community Drama Department had skills to engage these people with diverse backgrounds and make them act together.  The IGP has emerged.

Now it would be interesting to measure whether IGL principles are implemented in this IGP and whether  these organizations which are not age segregated implement IGP principles in reality.
All these topics and ideas were under the discussion on February 20 when the public seminar that I presented to introduce the practical context and theoretical framework of intersectional discrimination in intergenerational learning was held. There were doctoral students, university lecturers and people from other universities in the audience of the seminar. The seminar was organized under the roof (CR&DALL). Dr Chris McAllister from Glasgow Caledonian University as a participant estimated the seminar as a "very thought provoking" in his written feedback.

TiinaTambaum is a Research Fellow at the Estonian Institute for Population Studies, Tallinn University and she teaches Educational Gerontology classes for postgraduate students at the Institute of Educational Sciences. During the last 5 years she has been engaged in SHARE project as a researcher and a project manager. She belongs to the consortium of Erasmus+ project "Old men say yes to the community" together with Slovenian, Polish and Portuguese teams. In her doctoral research, she has been dealing with questions of tutoring skills in intergenerational learning circumstances in which teenage students instruct older people to use Internet. In 2015, she introduced her preliminary results also in Glasgow. She has published academic articles about older learners in mixed-age learning groups and about older rural men’s readiness and their obstacles to passing on their skills and knowledge. In 2016 the first Gerontology text book for HEIs in Estonian was published and two chapters were written by Tiina: “Educational Gerontology” and “Ageism”. In 2017, Tiina published a book in Estonian titled “Glasgow is better than Edinburgh”. This 121-pages hardcover book includes stories from periods Tiina spent in Glasgow in 2014–2015 and 2016 as a visiting researcher invited by University of Glasgow.