ITP 2012: Day 26 – Halah Mohammed Abbas

On 9 July/2012 we had many sessions on learning, volunteers and audience.

Stuart Frost gave us a general introduction about how the British Museum developed its learning programs, events and celebrations for a range of audiences from children to local communities and adult learners.

Then Richard Woff spoke about how they make children, families, communities engage in different activities at the museum, and how they provide teachers with supporting materials to help the run a museum visit. Faye Ellis talked about how the British Museum is using technology to keep attracting younger visitors to the Museum.

 

Claire Edwards gave us a session about the interpretation team, and talked in more detail about how they work closely with the curators and exhibitions designers, explaining how they are involved in editing the labels written by curators.

 

After lunch, we had a very interesting session about volunteers at the British Museum and how they have helped the Museum to run the free daily tours as well as assisting the curators. After this session we went on an exciting tour to see one of the volunteer worked at a ‘Hands On’ object handling desk.

 

Finally, we had a session on sharing expertise in different activities, covering the Future Curators and Knowledge Exchange. We discussed the key benefits of the partnerships in terms of strengthening the relationship between the British Museum and the partner museums. We were also divided into 5 groups, each selecting a category of audience and writing different ideas about how we could make these audiences engage with the Museum. We had a lot of fun talking about that and sharing our ideas with each other.

 

Halah Mohammed Abbas

Iraq