Lifelong Learning, creating our new families!

My work as an adult educator began in a fortuitous way. The year I graduate from visual arts a friend asked me to replace her in a drawing course for seniors of the Municipality of Santiago. I went to the first class and there I met a group of twenty students, in their 60s, 70s and almost 90s with their pencils and papers ready to learn.

Almost without realizing ten years passed in which I continued in the Municipality teaching art, illustration and other subjects to these groups of adult students.My students worked hard, improved every class and make me improve as a teacher too.

Teaching women over 60 has allowed me to know the history of my country through their point of view. All the social changes, all the advances in issues of rights for women, family planning, job opportunities.

I have seen women who have begun to live the life they dreamed at the age of 70. Thanks to the power of education many of them have left their homes and have known their peers, comparing their experiences, empathizing with their pains, learning that there are many ways to live and that they can have access to support groups that will allow them to be themselves.

Many of the women attending senior centers did not have children or grandchildren. These courses allow them to meet friends who become their family, with whom they can count if an emergency arises, with which they can share the weekends to be accompanied, to talk and laugh.

My students have been like my grandmothers, like the grandmothers of my daughter too. We have more than 20 different grandmothers who have filled us with sweets, gifts and affection.

Many of them are gone now and I miss them a lot.

The experience of being able to share with them all these years that I was their teacher has enriched my life.

Right now teaching for older adult students has become my passion and vocation. That is why I am developing a series of projects that aim to empower seniors in the use of new technologies in order to insert them socially and giving them autonomy and voice.

The act of learning should be a constant exercise in which the important thing is not so much what is taught but the time that we dedicate to being together and to share.

The time we take to receive new ways of seeing the world. That beautiful decision that an adult student take; the risk to change!