A recent study entitled Physiotherapy Students’ Perceptions of Ageing – Playing narratives as a Pedagogical Innovation” intended to explore the adoption of new perspectives on ageing after the implementation of dynamic narratives in the first graduate year for physiotherapy students.

Written by Marlene Rosa, Roberta Frontini (ciTechCare researchers) and Natália Martins, the exploratory qualitative study included 44 physiotherapy students from the School of Health Sciences, Polytechnic of Leiria.

Two gaming sessions were performed to help students, as narrators, express their visions and ways to deal with the geriatrics field. Also, the main question asked those students were “What is your perception regarding ageing?”.

Although negative perceptions about ageing were referred 39 times at the first step of the study (related to restriction, deterioration subthemes), there were no negative perceptions registered after the narratives experience.

In conclusion, this study demonstrated the potential of narrative-based experiences as a desirable pedagogic methodology (board games-oriented) for geriatric education in undergraduate health students.

+info: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0211139X23000690?via%3Dihub