Communication Science for Seniors (2025)
This four-part workshop series was developed in collaboration with Trent University as a more meaningful way of engaging older adults in lab-based research. If seniors were being asked to complete assessments as part of a study, the experience needed to feel like more than extraction. I supported that effort by designing and delivering a workshop series that offered something useful, engaging, and relevant in return.
Delivered at Princess Gardens, the program introduced older adults to emotional intelligence and soft-skills concepts through four sessions: Emotion, Connection, Motivation, and Integration. Each workshop combined a short talk, practical techniques, a guided activity, and informal social interaction. A resident at Princess Gardens also helped bring the sessions to life by performing songs connected to each workshop’s theme, giving the series a warmer and more participatory rhythm.
We built each talk around a particular neurotransmitter and then offered activities to help explore how they work in practice.
The material focused on everyday challenges that remain highly relevant in later life: stress carried in the body, hesitation around connection, difficulty sustaining goals and habits, and the need for self-advocacy with family members, caregivers, or medical professionals. Rather than presenting these ideas in a dense or clinical way, the series aimed to make them accessible, concrete, and immediately usable in daily life.
Supporting brochures and handouts extended the work beyond the room, translating core ideas into simple visual materials participants could revisit afterward. Seen now, the series was exploratory rather than definitive, but it remains a meaningful archive item. It shows an effort both to adapt emotional and social skill material for an older adult audience and to create a more humane, reciprocal setting for research participation.
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