In October, Maura O’Malley, Lifetime Arts’ CEO/Co-Founder, and Annie Montgomery, Senior Education Designer & Trainer, participated in the in-person event, Arts and Ageing Forum 2022: The Future of Arts and Ageing in Singapore, hosted by the National Arts Council (NAC) of Singapore. Maura delivered a keynote presentation on Lifetime Arts’ national work and impact in the U.S. and participated on a panel discussion with Singapore-based organizational leaders and artists. Annie facilitated a 4-hour Creative Aging Foundations Workshop for local community artists.
“Shift the narrative about aging and growing older away from a negative one, to that of optimism, engagement and community. Growing older is a natural and positive aspect of living. All of us are deserving of access to learning and to a community.”
— Maura O’Malley, Lifetime Arts CEO/Co-Founder
In the interview below (12:48), Maura and Annie share their experiences during this international event, which includes:
- Their insights about the arts, culture and aging scene in Singapore.
- Moments of learning and collaboration with community artists and educators on how they engage older adults in lifelong learning educational programs.
- Lifetime Arts’ international collaboration and sharing of creative aging practices and resources to succeed universal lifelong learning opportunities.
*Please also see NAC’s Key Takeaways from the forum, which includes impact statements from organizational leaders and artists on what it means to grow older, create more age-friendly spaces, and encourage interactions through the arts.
About Maura O’Malley
Maura O’Malley, Co-Founder and CEO of Lifetime Arts, leads the development of Lifetime Arts’ national programming models, training programs and resources for Creative Aging stakeholders including teaching artists. Named a 2017 Influencer in Aging by Next Avenue, she promotes the field of Creative Aging at major national conferences in the arts, public library and senior service sectors. She has informed policy and created innovative programming for adults and children with premiere arts and educational organizations including the NYC Department of Education, Studio in a School and Young Audiences/New York.
About Annie Montgomery
As Senior Education Designer and Trainer, Annie works on the delivery of special projects developing content, and designs and facilitates professional development training. With 25+ years of experience working as a teaching artist in youth, community, and creative aging programs, and 10+ years with Lifetime Arts, Annie works in partnership with teaching artists and organizational partners to help identify their needs and facilitates a strategy plan with them that will lead each to a path forward of maximum growth and sustainability of their creative aging programs. Annie is also a faculty member at the New School, teaching the year long required course, “Collaborative Research Studio: The Teaching Artist.”
Audio Transcript:
Maura O’Malley: Singapore has an incredibly rich, cultural life. They have the willingness, they have the commitment, they have the resources, and they have the cultural and arts resources to do good work and to build on the good work that they’ve already done. In our own United States, we say, one teaching artist with one curriculum, depending on who their curriculum is delivered to, is going to be a different program. It’s the same thing, where we can share what we’ve learned. We can share our structures and our models and our information, and hopefully, give them some ideas that will help them to further develop their own work.
Jacqueline DuMont: In October 2022, Maura O’Malley, Lifetime Arts CEO and Co-founder and Annie Montgomery, Senior Education Designer and Trainer, presented creative aging best practices and facilitated a four hour Creative Aging Foundations workshop at the Arts and Ageing Forum in Singapore, which was hosted by the National Arts Council of Singapore.
In this interview, Maura and Annie share their experiences participating in this international event. They share their insights about the arts, culture and aging scene in Singapore and share moments of learning in collaboration with local community artists and educators on how they engage older adults in lifelong learning educational programs. Maura also envisions how we can collectively share creative aging practices and resources internationally to succeed the common goal for universal lifelong learning opportunities.
Jacqueline: Could you share a little bit about what the arts, culture and aging scene was like in Singapore overall and what positive aging means for people in this country? Basically, how were they actively engaging older adults in this positive aging movement?
Maura: They’re very aware of the aging population, and in fact, their demographics are even more startling than in the U.S. In Singapore, within a few years, one quarter of the population will be over 65, as opposed to the U.S., which is 21%. For the past couple of years. I think actually since almost 2015, they have been working on improving aging services and taking stock of services for older adults in the country.
Jacqueline: What were the similarities and differences in how they incorporate creative aging values or lifelong learning values, goals and practices into their older adult education programs?
Maura: We noticed that there were many, many opportunities for people to take classes to be retrained. In every mall and every neighborhood, there were learning centers. The building that hosted the event that we were at was called the “Lifelong Learning Center.” So there’s a real emphasis on learning and engagement for the whole society there. The National Gallery, the National Museum, the National Performing Arts Center, and the Esplanade all have formal programs to look at older adults differently and to provide programming for older adults in the arts. And it’s arranged just like in the United States. It’s a range from not so active engagement to active engagement in learning programs. It’s quite a variety.
Annie Montgomery: They don’t call teaching artists, teaching artists. They call them community artists. And those of the community artists that we met that I would say, “Oh, they’re definitely teaching artists,” meaning they’re practicing artists. They’re working in the community. They’re interested in long-term projects, which to me felt the closest to creative aging goals and values when they were working with the same group of people consistently. But they would call them projects more so than classes. But to me I was like, “Aha, okay, that’s creative aging arts education in the way it was described.” So it’s happening, but it seems to be more individually artist-based, more so than institutional-based. But that’s really just from what we learned. There’s a lot that I still don’t know.
Jacqueline: Yeah, and that kind of leads to my next question. Annie, what kind of “aha” moments or moments of connection, learning and collaboration were there during the workshop between the community artists and also just between you and the artists?
Annie: They were kind of surprised by our codification of our learning principles and our design principles because that was new to them in terms of codifying it. Sometimes when we talk about learning design principles, it is based on what we’ve seen artists doing, but we’ve sort of named it.
The difference in the “aha” moment for them was like, “Okay, we are doing some social engagement, we are doing some sequential learning.” But the “aha” moment was like, “Oh, we’re moving to mastery with these folks and we’re moving to a sense of identifying them, the older adults, as artists too.” Not just being simply guided by the artist and with the artist’s direction, but this slip of like through the project, the older adults start to see and believe in their own artistry and their own capabilities. And more than one artist was like, “Oh, we’re not doing this for them. We’re doing this with them.” And I think that sort of turn was really exciting for a lot of the artists, once we kind of landed on that discovery together.
Jacqueline: That topic sort of leads me to the panel discussion, Maura, that you participated with artists and arts educators and leaders from Singapore. So I kind of have the same question for you. Were there other “aha” moments, moments of learning, discovery, relatability, or differences? What questions did the panel raise for you? What was that experience like hearing from those working in Singapore?
Maura: Well, they had an interesting group of panels. Other than me, it was the woman who headed up the Esplanade from the National Performing Arts Center. And she talked a lot about their one program of intergenerational programming. So that was interesting to hear, and they were very proud of that work. I think it was more theater-based or hip hop music-based work with different generations.
Another woman there was Emi Kiyota, who is an associate professor at the university there. She’s also an architect by training, and she is a consultant to the National University Health System and looks at the physical structure of different parts of the city in terms of support for older adults. So the idea of universal design and the physical space of people was, you know, top of mind and of great interest there.
There were some interesting questions from the audience too. One of the ones that I thought was most interesting was, “How do young artists help older people not to be nervous about getting older?” So our response was, “Well, who’s nervous about getting older? Is it the older people or is it the younger people?” And looking at it and sort of flipping that question on its head.
It was a good group. There were 100 people online and 100 people in the audience. And they were very good questions and I think people were interested in the way that we frame the programming that we do, in terms of access and the impact of ageism on program design and delivery. So it was fascinating.
Jacqueline: What were the views or attitudes around ageism? How did you address these components in the workshop or in the panel discussion?
Annie: I can speak about the workshop specifically. They needed more defining examples than we would normally see in the United States. I really had to go around to each table, and give them my own sort of ageism or my ageist thoughts about myself. And I used myself so they would feel comfortable to be vulnerable in their own sharing too. But they all kind of needed that extra push because I do think that culturally, they really regard their older adults.
I think that’s testament to these efforts in making sure that their older adults are taken care of and that there’s programs for them. And you will see older adults everywhere in the parks. There is a visibility in Singapore with their older adults and respect. I do think their family, Maura and I talked about this a lot, that their family sort of dynamics are still much more together than they are in the United States, where we just fly across the country and our older adults are living independently or in care systems and you see less of that there. So we had to define it more.
And then it also made it for a much more complex conversation, but without any definitive sort of action steps, at least not in four hours. It was sort of just beginning to understand what it might look like in their culture, which there’s still a lot of discovery to do.
Jacqueline: How do you envision our own creative aging practices and goals in the U.S. and at Lifetime Arts integrating into Singapore’s own practices and in addition to that, other culturally different countries, but doing this in a collaborative way that is respectful to their cultural norms and traditions?
Maura: Singapore has an incredibly rich, cultural life. They have great artists. They have many, many arts organizations in all different disciplines. So they have all of the assets and all the things that any community would need to begin to build programming that’s responsive and engaging and meaningful to older adults and to the organizations themselves.
It’s always important to share work and knowing and understanding that what they do with what we’ve shared with them, it may look very, very different. We’ve learned a lot over these years and we have been successful in creating programs and services that are making things better for older adults. And so if any of that can rub off, I think for Singapore, they have the willingness, they have the commitment, they have the resources, they have the cultural and arts resources to do good work and to build on the good work that they’ve already done.
In our own United States, we say, one teaching artist with one curriculum, depending on who that curriculum is delivered to, is going to be a different program. It’s the same thing, where we can share what we’ve learned, we can share our structures and our models and our information and hopefully give them some ideas that will help them to further develop their own work.
Jacqueline: For more information about Lifetime Arts, please visit lifetimearts.org and sign up for our newsletter. To learn more about the creative aging field, please visit our resource site, The Creative Aging Resource at creativeagingresource.org and sign up for the Creative Aging Resource Newsletter at creativeagingnews.substack.com.
