Advance HE Teaching & Learning Conference 2018: Voices in the room: Bringing outside communities into the classroom

This paper outlines the ‘Voices in the room’ project which brought older adults into stage two Geography seminars. The project had two aims: to expand the range of experience present in the seminar room to help students see the relevance of the material they were studying to lived experience; and to encourage interaction between students by having participants who were more confident in their interactions to model and to seed discussion. Taking a vignette approach this paper considers both the ways in which these aims were partially met and the things I learnt along the way.