Inclusive intergenerational family learning as a tool for lifelong learning IFL – 4 th Meeting, BRAGA, PORTUGAL 19 th -23 rd July 2013 Seminar 4: “Parents as resources for supporting children’s learning. Supporting parents as first educators ” MACKA PUBLIC EDUCATION CENTRE TRABZON/TURKEY

Supporting parents as first educators - As we comprehended the results of the questionaire during our last meeting in Poland, different cultures have different social trends and habits. We also realized that different generations have different inclinations and needs. When we consider Turk family pattern, we can approach this issue with two different perspectives as parents and children from rurals are still more traditional and they have stronger family relations than urban ones.In urban places, people have much more modern lives,and literacy level is substantially high. However in rurals, literacy is lower and people have more conservative surroundings. As a result of this distinction, teacher-student rapport and also parent-child relations differ from these two different social environments.

In the first group, families are more conscius about their children’s education. Additionaly, these families are generally literate and they are more concerned about their children’s wants and their education. When we consider the effects of the generation gap over these people, there are not so challenging problems among family members. As democratic attitude is dominant at their homes, members of such kind of families are educated and they have their own economic freedom. MODERN FAMILIES

TRADITIONAL FAMILIES In the second group, in general literacy level is not so high and families live by agriculture so we cannot state that most of the family members are economically independant.These families support their children’s compulsory education but they are not conscious about their educational requirements and wants. We can feel the negative effects of generation gap over family relations and school life strongly. The biggest reason underlying the problem is illetaracy or lack of educational background. For these reasons, these traditional families cannot keep up with continual innovation of this era. In order to overcome the drawbacks of adult illiterature or lack of education, public education centres have wide range of training courses to support personal development of both adults and youngs.

FORMAL TRAININGINFORMAL TRAINING

As educators, we cannot underestimate the effect of the formal education over pupils,yet it is so obvious that informal education forms the basic blocks to support formal education. In order to get healthy results about family – children relations, we need to direct adults to compensate their lack points though different training courses, informative lectures, family -children seminars etc.

At this point, can we adress these problems as different foundations? What can we do to enable adults to apply different educational programmes? What have we done for adult education as a public education centre and secondary school so far?

As a public education centre; We have a wide range of training courses in regular intervals; some of these courses are related to getting a proffession, some of them are hobby related activities and the others are self- improvement courses. Reading-writing,computer and web-use,musical instrument,silver carft, plaster painting, needle craft,glass making courses, etc. In addition to these courses, people can ask for different courses when they reach enough number for this course ( nearly 15 people for each course), these courses are also available for them. We also arrange some informal facilities to provide stonger relations between our trainees and trainers such as museum or cultural places tours, kite festivals, handmade –products exhibitions,etc

As a folk education center,we encourage our parents to involve in our facilities such as nature tours, infamilial -relations seminars, end of term facilities.