An educational journey
Louise Alden, the learning and access team leader at Birmingham Museums Trust, says that trails providing a tour of the gallery are often used for school visits.
Pupils are given a set of images of objects that they need to locate and find out about on a key ring. Those taking part are encouraged to complete worksheets on what they have found, as well as interpret their experiences artistically.
Alden says that following a trail can give the
pupils, who are often at Key Stage 2 level, a deeper level of understanding of
a museum’s work.
“The children are learning from the real objects in the gallery – they’re exploring the gallery and understanding the importance of the museum’s role in looking after collections,” she says.
The trails, put together by the museum’s team
of learning officers and curators, cover a range of history subjects taught in
schools, including ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Anglo-Saxons.
“We have to make them broad enough and accessible enough so that schools can target them to their own teaching,” says Alden.
She adds that access to real objects is one of the key ways that trails can complement pupils’ classroom learning.
“[Children] may have learned about what life was like for a particular group of people, but seeing the objects associated with that can bring on a deeper level of understanding,” she says.
Creating links
Karen Davies, the head of learning research and resources at the Science Museum, London, says that trails can make collections relevant
and appealing to school pupils, allowing them to make links between gallery
content and their own lives.
The Science Museum provides trails online for
teachers to download in preparation for school visits.
Davies says that the trails aim to give teachers the confidence to lead groups in galleries, with clear instructions so they can quickly know what to do when they visit, rather than wading through pages of text.
“In the object-rich galleries, teachers can sometimes feel quite overwhelmed because there is so much to see and do,” says Davies. “And they are also time-starved. A resource like a trail is way of helping focus things for them.”
The Spectacular Space trail, for example, asks pupils to find objects in the gallery and then answer
questions about them. In the first section they are asked to find the Apollo 10
Command Module and then look for evidence that it went into space.
Then they need to drop a pen and paper at the same time and see which hits the ground first, and ponder why the same didn’t happen when a similar experiment was tried on the moon.
The trail was intended to be a prompt sheet
for teachers or adult group leaders, so includes the answers.
But during
testing, it emerged that some teachers preferred to give the sheets out for pupils
to complete themselves.
Davies says that allowing for this kind of flexibility is important. “It shouldn’t be so formulaic that people think there is only one way to do it,” she says.
Davies warns against falling into the trap of
thinking that material needs to be worthy simply because it is educational.
She says there is a lot of overlap between formal and informal learning, and that content should be exciting and inspirational, whether it is for families or schools. “Whatever you create needs to be something that people want to do,” she says.
Davies believes that the most effective trails encourage students to actively participate, whether on a mental or a physical level. She says that it can be useful to have trails that provide “choice and control” to the participants, rather than a set route.
In the museum’s Great Object Hunt trail, pupils
are asked to find objects that fit certain criteria, such as “something smaller
than a mouse” and “something made of wood”. Davies says that this approach allows
pupils to be creative because there are no right or wrong answers.
“Each student will have a very different take on it, which they then explain to the teacher or group. They are more engaged because it’s something that’s of interest to them,” she says.
The Science Museum is working with King’s College London on the five-year Enterprising Science project, which focuses on finding ways to build science capital – science-related qualifications, interest, literacy and social contacts – among young people.
The project has examined the potential of
museum trails by working with 119 students aged 11-13 and 11 teachers
from seven schools.
It involved developing pre and post-visit activities in
the classroom, and designing a class visit during which the students created
the content for trails to be used by classmates, as well as their families at a
later date.
Pupils were encouraged to develop their own content and to present information in ways they felt would be relevant and interesting to themselves and their families.
“Our intention was to help students to feel at home
within the museum context, and become an expert in a particular subject area,”
says Amy Seakins, a research associate on the Enterprising Science project.
“Our research on science capital shows that it is important to build on and value students’ own experiences, attitudes and knowledge.”
“Through taking ownership and authorship over their museum trails, students were able to develop a greater knowledge in topics that they found personally relevant, and in turn gain greater confidence in their science related abilities”.
Educational apps
The Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum in Dorset has found
that its app trail can be a useful tool for encouraging engagement with the
museum’s content before and after a school visit.
The app is a series of short films, which are designed to follow a route in the area surrounding the museum, but also make sense when watched off-site.
Tom de Wit, the museum’s manager, says that some school groups download the app to their own devices before they visit. This allows them to become familiar with the period covered by the museum beforehand, and consolidate their learning afterwards.
“When you have got a group of kids, having a
resource that they can download onto their own equipment can be a lot easier
than getting in touch with us and then printing something out,” says de Wit.
“It wasn’t necessarily one of our key aims, but it’s turned out that the app is a really useful educational tool, and we’re now actively promoting it to schools.”
The material is not only useful for pupils studying history, but also those exploring social and constitutional issues, says de Wit, who adds that the short film format is a good hook for grabbing young people’s attention and drawing them into the story, so they want to find out more.
“It’s easier to ask them to watch a short film than to get them to read a book,” says de Wit. “Once they care, then they will read a book on the subject. But they wouldn’t read it if they didn’t realise how interesting it was going to be.”