Exploring Dementia: Storytelling and Photography

Alison Ward, Researcher at the University of Northampton’s Institute for Health and Wellbeing, has recently returned from a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to Denmark. Her aim was to find out about creative activities and services which are being delivered in Denmark to support people with dementia.

Alison spent four weeks at VUK (Voksenskolen for Undervisning og Kommunikation), a school for adult education providing cognitive training and creative lessons for people with dementia, who attend the school as students. Alison led a project exploring the students’ experiences of attending the school. Students took photographs of their school activities which were used as prompts for conversations and to create storyboards and poetry.

During this presentation, Alison will talk about the key learning from her time at VUK, what activities the students do at the school and the importance they place on lifelong learning, the importance of friendships and being with ‘likeminded’ people, how the student’s experience living with dementia and the value gained from using the creative methods of photography and storytelling in this research study. The presentation will also explore the impact on the students of running the project as a Danish/English collaboration.