The proposed paper is one of the outputs of a four-year project “Intergenerational Learning Across Social Environments” which focuses – apart from learning in the workplace and school environment – also on intergenerational learning in communities.

The central starting point is the concept of intergenerational learning, i.e. “a process aiming for bringing people together by targeted mutually beneficial activities fostering more understanding and respect between generations which can help build up community cohesion” (Fischer, 2008, p. 8). Our research attention is focused on the very environment of communities and community learning, i.e. activities including various intergenerational educational programmes (leisure-time education) that offers scope for non-formal and informal learning and in which people of all ages engage. In this project it seems meaningful to emphasize the intergenerational aspect, working with communities as areas where members of different generations mingle, finding find scope for encounters and mutual learning – to conceptualize the intergenerational community. As the document Generations United (2013) reports, an intergenerational community is a community which adequately provides safety, health, education and basic cooperation, and supports programmes, policies and practices enhancing cooperation, interaction and exchange among people of different generations, and, last but not least, makes it possible for all age groups to share their talents and resources, supporting thus relations among them, beneficial not only to the individual but also to society as a whole. It is therefore much more than just physical living space shared by people. The social aspect is vital – community is a space into which people are integrated, whose part they are and where they can share, especially through hobby associations and civic initiatives.

Content-wise, the paper is a follow-up to our presentation “Intergenerational Learning in Communities”, presented at the ECER conference in Porto in 2014. We then presented outputs of the first qualitative research stage (using the obserview method, i.e. a method combining interview and observation) in which we identified the protagonists of situations of intergenerational learning and their degrees of involvement, who was learning from whom in intergenerational contact, what intergenerational contact consisted of and what circumstances in the community are necessary for it to arise.

It is these results that the second, quantitative research phase – whose results will be presented in the proposed paper – is building on. Its objective is to verify and quantify the results of the above-described qualitative survey and characterize the phenomena identified as to frequency, intensity and evaluation by the protagonists. The research questions we are asking in the paper are the following:

1. What is the frequency of situations of intergenerational learning in the communities under observation?
2. What is the intensity of processes of intergenerational learning in the communities under observation?
3. What conditions for intergenerational learning have been set up and how do they hinder or support learning processes in the communities under observation?

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