Case Studies for English Heritage PSA3 Progress Report

Case Studies for English Heritage PSA3 Progress Report May 2007

Multi-faith Trails for Heritage Open Days

The Outreach team works in partnership with the Civic Trust to take the HODs scheme into new communities in areas of the country where there has been little or no previous participation, and encouraging people to open up properties and run activities that represent England’s diverse histories.

To increase the diversity of properties participating, the Outreach team has concentrated on developing multi-faith trails, bringing people from different faiths to work together to open up their buildings and share the way they use their buildings with the wider community. This promotes the notion of ‘interculturalism’, defined as being an extension of multicultural working which promotes positive interaction between groupings rather than passive coexistence. In some areas, different faith groups have come together to form a steering group to take the event forward, working together for the first time.

Hindu Temples, Gurdwaras, Mosques, Churches, Synagogues, Buddhist Temples and a Jain Centre have all taken part. In 2003, before the Outreach team began work in this area, 4 faith buildings other than churches took part in HODs. In 2005 the total number was 37 and in 2006 it was 45.

Cities where multi-faith trails have been set up include: o Wolverhampton o Bradford o Cheetham Hill, Manchester o Leicester

In Wolverhampton, we worked with young people from 6 faith buildings to produce a DVD called ‘Our Faith Buildings’ where

To accompany the Wolverhampton Faith Buildings Trail, we worked with young people from each faith building taking part in the event to produce a short film about their building, exploring the ways in which it is used and the different spaces within. The film was shown to people from all the participating faith buildings at a launch in Wolverhampton and then at different venues over the HODs weekend. It has also been distributed to schools within the city to help young people learn about, understand and celebrate the diversity of the city and its religious heritage.

“It was exciting to see a room full of people from such different backgrounds celebrating their own buildings and open to learn about others.” Participant, ‘Our Faith Buildings’, film created for Wolverhampton faith trail. Images attached: the HODs leaflet for Leicester, filming for the Wolverhampton ‘Our Faith Buildings’ film, a HODs visit to the Shree Hindu Temple on the Bradford multi-faith trail, a HODs for the Dhamma Talaka Buddhist Peace Pagoda in Birmingham.

Your Place or Mine conference, November 2006.

On a national level, the English Heritage Outreach Department is committed to supporting the sector. In November 2006, the Outreach Department ran the ‘Your Place or Mine? Engaging New Audiences with Heritage’ Conference in partnership with the National Trust.

This was a major, national event which brought together over 350 policy makers and practitioners from heritage, museums, cultural and community organisations to learn new skills, network and debate the big questions that engaging new audiences with heritage challenges us to explore: Whose story are we telling? Do we need to redefine ‘heritage’? What do roots, identity and sense of place mean in today’s society? Practical workshops covered topics from how to engage young people with heritage to understanding the needs of different social and cultural groups.

One of the major outcomes of the Your Place or Mine? Conference was the creation of the blog website (www.english- heritage.org.uk/yourplaceormine). It is both a record of the conference and a place to continue the debates begun at the event. It includes summaries of the key debates, reports and downloadable handouts from the practical workshops, audio interviews with speakers and photos. It is interactive as it allows immediate comment / discussion from visitors to continue the debates started at the event. November 2006 to February 2007, the blog site has had 8547 visits.

Following on from the Your Place or Mine? Conference, the most important follow-up that delegates wanted was more chances to network, share ideas and make contacts. To this end, a long term legacy will be the creation of an online professional networking website.

The website will be an interactive, multimedia resource that will work for the heritage sector as a place to come for information about running community based heritage projects. It will be a place for people to network virtually with other professionals, find project partners, highlight events, find suppliers and freelancers, discuss issues and problems in forums / blogs and create their own smaller, possibly regional, groups as they need. The website would also contain links to good practise case studies and toolkits.

Image attached: colour logo for the Your Place or Mine conference. BRINGING COMMUNITIES TOGETHER ‘KUSHTI ATCHIN TAN’ – YOUNG TRAVELLERS PROJECT, KENT ‘Kushti Atchin Tan’ means ‘good stopping place’ in the Romany language. It is the name given to a short film created by young Romany Gypsy students who are settled in Kent and attend a school in Cranbrook.This English Heritage outreach project was inspired by the students themselves who wanted to share what they knew about their culture and to find out more about how it has evolved through time. From January to July 2006, the students explored their culture and heritage through craft activities, film and oral history.They produced a film focusing on their history, including changing lifestyles for Travellers over the last 100 years, traditional cooking and life in a bender tent, while learning some of the technical skills involved in film production.This film will form the basis for teaching resources developed in partnership with the Minority Communities Achievement Service at Kent County Council.These resources will be launched early in 2007 and given free to every school in Kent to support them in exploring Romany history in the classroom, with the aim of raising awareness of the rich heritage of this marginalised group amongst young people throughout the county. Image to follow

THE GATEWAY GARDENS TRUST The Gateway Gardens Trust is a small heritage charity assisting diverse audiences by arranging free, escorted, tailor-made visit programmes to historic parks and gardens.The project links the historic, cultural and environmental heritage with those in the community who are least likely to find it easy to access heritage because of low incomes, poor provision of public transport, a disability, lack of knowledge and feeling excluded from ‘elitist’ heritage. Its diverse audiences include minority ethnic groups, people with disabilities, older people, innercity children and those suffering from rural poverty, women’s groups, people with mental health problems, carers, youth groups, schoolchildren, children attending special schools and lifelong learners. The Trust has introduced more than 15,000 people to the historic parks and gardens of Wales.With the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage, Natural England and the Commission for Racial Equality, theTrust’s West Midlands project ‘Opening the Gates’ aims to work with over 10,000 people providing access to a potential list of 112 historic parks and gardens in the region.The Trust’s new visit programmes involve working with the same groups over several gardens of different periods and styles, holding follow-up workshops, and therefore making the programmes informal education and access packages rather than one- off visits.Working with the National Trust and the Historic Houses Association and individual parks and gardens, the aim is to open them up to audiences they may have difficulty reaching. Every visit is tailor-made. Relationship building begins weeks beforehand, and continues afterwards, with both the garden to be visited and also the group in question. This liaison works to the strengths of the garden, ensuring that their staff know what to expect from a visiting group and providing advice on how to engage with new visitors. Advice is given to the group on what to expect at their chosen garden.A Gateway visit includes transport, admission and a guided tour with garden interpretation focused on the specific needs of a group.Visits aim to ensure a high quality experience, so that visitors may be encouraged to visit an historic garden again and importantly for garden heritage’s sustainable future, under their own steam. www.gatewaygardenstrust.org Image to follow

APNA GHAR (OUR HOME) In 2006, the English Heritage West Midlands Outreach Officer worked in collaboration with Foursight Theatre and Black Country Touring on a project to develop a community performance inspired by the stories of South Asian women from Sandwell. Funding support came from English Heritage,Arts Council England, Esmee Fairbairn, Walsall Council, Sandwell and Dudley Metropolitan Borough Councils and Wolverhampton City Council. Oral history training was offered to a group of local Asian women working on the project and the play was based on testimony of women who had migrated to the area from the 1950s onwards.The theme of the piece was the meaning of “home” and the struggle to make a home in a new environment. The aims of the project were to highlight the meanings of the local historic environment for different generations of Asian women living in the Sandwell area, to involve the Asian community in collecting and interpreting that intangible connection to the built heritage, and to share this story across communities through performance. The play was performed in a Victorian school building. Foursight Theatre used a core group of professional actors but also involved children from a local school and an Asian women’s mental health group as performers. Women whose reminiscences were used in the piece attended rehearsals and helped shape the play.There was a strong inter-generational element to the project. Qualitative evaluation was carried out using mini-disk recorders to capture audience and participant responses before and after the performances. Foursight company members and community participants were also interviewed about the process. Audience feedback was strongly positive, many people were attending a performance or heritage event for the first time, and the inter-generational and cross-community sharing of heritage were much appreciated. Image to follow

Inclusive, Accessible, Archaeology (forthcoming article from Conservation Bulletin 55 – project funded by English Heritage HEEP grant) Tim Phillips & Roberta Gilchrist (Department of Archaeology, University of Reading)

The idea that people with disabilities may participate in fieldwork is not thought to be something that is practical. This is a misconception as quite a number of people involved in field archaeology have some form of recognised disability. Such prejudices must also be considered within the context of the recent disability legislation which makes it illegal to discriminate against disabled people with regards to employment and access to education and services. Fieldwork training is a key element of an undergraduate archaeology degree and, although much has been done to make on-campus teaching inclusive, less effort had been directed at making fieldwork accessible. The Inclusive, Accessible, Archaeology (IAA) project was set up to redress this imbalance.

The aims and objectives of the project were to:

 Increase the awareness of disability issues in archaeology  Improve the integration of disability in fieldwork teaching  Increase all students’ awareness of the transferable skills gained through fieldwork training  Develop a self-evaluation tool kit to encourage all students to reflect on their developing skills and abilities.

The tool kit was developed with the help of disabled and non-disabled students through controlled tests and field trials on training excavations. All students can use it to evaluate their potential abilities to participate in fieldwork. For disabled students tasks that may need to be modified, or where assistance may have to be provided, can be identified. After the completion of fieldwork, individual abilities and skills can be evaluated at different levels of attainment. The tool kit can be used after successive periods of fieldwork, thus allowing individuals to identify areas of strength and weakness and track their developing abilities and skills.

‘I found the process of self-evaluation a useful exercise, especially the section on transferable skills. I am unsure if I was totally objective, but it did make me think about how and why I was doing particular things. I also enjoyed being part of the self-evaluation project; it felt like people were taking an interest in me personally.’ (Julian: heart condition)

‘I felt very comfortable doing the self-evaluation and preferred it to being evaluated by another person. It gave me the opportunity to look at the things I had been doing, and how well I had been doing them, and this helped to fix the experiences in my mind.’ (Evelyn: Dyslexia/Dyspraxia)

The project team has collected a number of case studies based on interviews with disabled students and professional archaeologists. A set of guidelines of good practice for including disabled students in fieldwork training has also been produced. These are partly based on the experiences of the project team, but mainly on the actual experiences of disabled students and archaeology departments. The guidelines also contain advice on making archaeological excavations accessible to the general public. These resources can all be found on the project website.

The tool kit will be available as a downloadable resource on the project website the Council for British Archaeology’s website: http://www.hca.heacdemy.ac.uk/access-archaeology/inclusive_accessible http://www.britarch.ac.uk

Illustration Captions (attached)

Fig 1 The common perception of disability (Photo - Margaret Matthews)

Fig 2 How disability often appears: visually impaired student examining finds (Photo - Tim Phillips)