Alternate generation education: a developmental curriculum for secondary schools

This article addresses the development, implementation, and evaluation of a high school curriculum intervention designed to promote the psychological development of students enrolled in a course on life history interviewing. The curriculum, based on the Deliberate Psychological Education practicum-seminar model, included field interviewing of older people about their lives, plus a class seminar to teach appropriate skills, discuss pertinent issues related to aging, and integrate the field experience. Students assumed the responsible role of life history interviewer, conducting at least three hours of interviews with one older person, thus counter-acting both adolescent egocentrism and generational isolation. The curriculum was designed to foster adolescents' understanding of older people in a manner which also stimulated the younger people's psychological development. A total of fifty-one tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders at a public high school in a large midwestern city during the fall of 1979 were the subjects for the study. The multiple quantitative and qualitative measures indicated that the curriculum had a positive effect on the experimental students' psychological development. ANOCOVA procedures revealed that attitudes toward older people were significantly more positive, pre to post, for the experimental group (p less than .001), while those of the comparison group showed no change. Implications of the study for increased emphasis on responsible role-taking by adolescents in school programs, on intergenerational programming with a lifelong developmental focus, and on further time perspective research are discussed in the article.