Case study: The Dorman Museum’s “Museum in Your Classroom” programme and St Joseph’s RC Primary School,

Partnership between the Dorman Museum and Heritage Schools

Middlesbrough’s Dorman Museum has been working with Heritage Schools since 2018, as there is a strong synergy between the Dorman’s Museum in Your Classroom local heritage programme (described in more detail below) and Heritage Schools.

The Dorman Museum has a wide-ranging collection of social and natural history, archaeology and the internationally-important collection of the works of pioneer designer Christopher Dresser. In 2018 Middlesbrough became a new area of work for Heritage Schools in the North East region.

The Heritage Schools Local Heritage Education Manager approached the Learning Officer at the Dorman to identify schools which would be interested in becoming Heritage Schools – proactive schools which would welcome additional resources about their local heritage.

In this first year of collaboration, four schools have become Heritage Schools, including St Joseph’s RC Primary, whose project is outlined below. Heritage Schools is promoted via Museum in Your Classroom, and schools gain the Heritage Schools award through carrying out a Museum in Your Classroom project.

St Joseph’s RC Primary School’s Heritage Schools Award

The focus on local heritage has a strong appeal to Middlesbrough schools, many of which have been using the Cornerstones Curriculum (https://cornerstoneseducation.co.uk/) which is topic-based and has a local focus. Many Middlesbrough schools are now moving to a new curriculum, which is being designed by an education consultant and will be even more locally-based. Teachers are now used to topic-based teaching which fits very well with Museum in Your Classroom and Heritage Schools so it is anticipated that more schools will take up both opportunities in the future.

“Teachers are choosing to teach things which are more local and relevant to their pupils, moving from house to street to town to country and then to the planet as a whole, which helps pupils to understand the sense of place. They can relate to it more easily as it is their own area and not a distant place” (Learning Officer, Dorman Museum)

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Schools can receive some funding from Heritage Schools for heritage projects, and this has encouraged some schools to take part in Museum in Your Classroom so that they can buy in an artist or a local historian, for example, to enhance their project. The Dorman and Heritage Schools are now offering joint CPD days for teachers, promoted through both their networks, and these have been well attended (28 attended the CPD session in June) as teachers wish to gain skills and knowledge to teach local heritage more effectively.

Museum in Your Classroom

Museum in Your Classroom is one of the strands of “Making a Mark”, a partnership project with museums in the Tees Valley and the National Portrait Gallery, funded by the Arts Council, which began in 2011 (https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/makingamark/home/). Making a Mark enables schools to deliver cultural education across the curriculum, and encourages students to understand more about, and be proud of, their local heritage and identity, and thus raise their aspirations. For these reasons, Making a Mark fits very neatly with Heritage Schools.

The Museum in Your Classroom was co-created with teachers and a learning consultant. All Museum in Your Classroom projects involve visits to one of the Tees Valley museums. A comprehensive toolkit (https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/makingamark/teaching-resources/toolkit/) and online resources help teachers plan, create exhibitions and hold events to encourage parents and carers into the school to see their children’s work. In most schools, one year group does a Museum in Your Classroom project, although one school has done a whole-school project and next year the whole academy trust (of which it is a part) will do Museum in Your Classroom projects.

St Joseph’s RC Primary School’s Heritage Schools project

St Joseph’s has around 350 pupils, most of whom are from families who have lived in the area for many years, although several have arrived in Middlesbrough recently and have English as an additional language. The school already had good links with the Dorman through previous visits. The museum is within walking distance of the school, across Albert Park, which makes it easy to visit.

2018 was the 150th anniversary of Albert Park, so the Dorman devised The Enchanted Woodland, a history and science project covering the history of the park, using Heritage Schools resources of photographs and maps, and using the museum’s taxidermy and natural history collections to learn about the wildlife and the trees.

The Heritage Schools Local Heritage Education Manager had already provided CPD training for the staff at St Joseph’s to use the photographs and maps effectively so that their pupils could learn about the history of the area around the school, including Albert Park. The three Key Stage 1 classes (Year 1, Year 2 and a mixed Year 1 and 2 class) took part in the Enchanted Woodland. The pupils made a visit to the park and took part in a session at the museum making clay animals which made a link to the Dresser ceramics collection.

Later in the term the pupils made another visit to the museum for a winter crafts workshop, to which their parents were invited too, thus increasing the connection between the parents and the school and enabling the parents to understand more about what the children had been learning.

The pupils also made leaf rubbings, learned about deciduous and evergreen trees, and wrote poems about the animals which live in the park. The teachers used the Museum in Your Classroom toolkit to develop the project and the pupils’ Enchanted Woodland work was displayed as an exhibition in the school for parents, which included the Heritage Schools maps of Albert Park’s development and historic photographs of the park.

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The pupils created a quiz for the parents so that they could find out more about the history of the park from the exhibition. The combination of Heritage Schools and Museum in Your Classroom resources added richness to the project and exhibition, as it combined History, Geography, Science, Literacy and Art.

Parents and children studying historic maps and photographs in the Enchanted Woodland exhibition

Impacts on St Joseph’s Primary

Although all of the Key Stage 1 pupils had visited Albert Park before, either through school visits or with their families, as part of The Enchanted Woodland they visited more areas of the park and learned about its history. Many of the pupils had visited the Dorman previously as well, and the Museum in Your Classroom visit enabled them to learn from the museum’s natural history collections.

Historic postcards of Albert Park

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The grandfather of one of the pupils has an extensive collection of historic postcards of Albert Park, so he brought them in to school as part of the Museum in Your Classroom exhibition. Some of the pupils took the opportunity to ask their parents and grandparents about Middlesbrough in the past, and families were fascinated to see the Enchanted Woodland exhibition in school.

Parents wrote comments about the exhibition on facsimile postcards “It got different generations to talk to each other. They hadn’t talked about the park before” (Learning Officer, Dorman Museum)

As a result of the Heritage Schools CPD training and the Museum in Your Classroom resources, teachers throughout the school are situating their teaching within the local area. For example, the Year 5 classes are studying how changed during the Victorian period, particularly looking at mining and the development of the railways. Previously they would have “done the Victorians” without necessarily having any local focus.

“All the teachers will be using Heritage Schools resources from September 2019 onwards with the new curriculum. It will make them confident to teach a new curriculum with a local focus. Often History does not get the same weight in CPD [as other subjects] but the Heritage Schools CPD has provided activities for how to use the resources. Everyone is really positive about them.” (Year 1&2 teacher)

Dorman Museum, maze, fountain, flowers Maze, years ago

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The teacher commented that the Enchanted Woodland project had increased the pupils’ awareness of their surroundings and their enthusiasm for learning about them. This was evident during the evaluation discussion which took place with the Year 1 and Year 2 class in school at the end of the summer term, when they had done the project in the latter half of the autumn term.

Pupils drew pictures of places they had discovered at Albert Park, and pictures of what parts of the park had been like in the past, based on what they remembered of the historic photographs and postcards. This indicates that the project has met the Heritage Schools’ aim of increasing pupils’ pride in their local area. A further Heritage Schools aim is to enable pupils to make links between their local history and national history.

The pupils will continue to make connections from the local to the national and international by learning about Captain Cook, who was born in Middlesbrough, and Australia, and finding out about the national impact of Christopher Dresser’s ceramic designs.

“The CPD has been brilliant for Key Stage 1 through improved pedagogy” (Key Stage 1 teacher)

St Joseph’s is proud to have received its Heritage Schools Award:

“I would definitely recommend the acquisition of the Heritage Schools award. I believe our links with the Heritage Schools programme will ensure that St Joseph’s will establish humanities within the heart of the new curriculum and provide a high quality planning and resource network.” (Year 1&2 Teacher)

Impacts on the Dorman Museum

“These are two mature programmes [Heritage Schools and Museum in Your Classroom] going together and they are more than a sum of their parts. It’s symbiosis – a genuine shared and complementary agenda and it is more irresistible to schools” (Making A Mark learning consultant)

The collaboration with Heritage Schools has helped cement the connections between the museum and participating schools. For example, St Joseph’s has sought advice from the Dorman staff about creative activities they can do in the classroom, linked to the Dresser ceramics collection. Teachers in all the Heritage Schools are more aware of wider museum networks, for example knowing which museums have Greek objects in their collections to teach Ancient Greece and are therefore more likely to make more museum visits or use museum resources

“What an amazing resource the museum is, because of the knowledge and creativity” (St Joseph’s teacher)

The Dorman is focusing on developing children’s cultural capital, which will form part of the new OFSTED inspection framework from September 2019. Cultural capital refers to the difference made to children’s lives through visiting museums and other cultural venues, having hobbies and taking part in other activities to broaden their horizons.

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Flier for CPD training day

Get Creative with Local History, the CPD training day which the Dorman Museum, Captain Cook Birthplace Museum and Heritage Schools delivered in June 2019, was the museum’s best-attended training day. The Making A Mark Learning Advisor attributed this to the added value which Heritage Schools provided and the specific links to the new OFSTED inspection framework: a broad and balanced curriculum and quality teaching. The broad and balanced curriculum will move away from the concentration on core subjects and allow more time for history and geography, both of which are enhanced by Heritage Schools and Museum in Your Classroom. The Dorman will consult with schools to see how the museum can contribute to a place-based curriculum.

Summary

The Dorman Museum and Heritage Schools have both benefitted from working together. The Dorman’s Museum in Your Classroom was already well established as a way for schools to use their local heritage in their teaching. Middlesbrough was a new area for Heritage Schools in 2018, so by teaming up with the Dorman the museum learning staff could encourage Museum in Your Classroom schools to take part in Heritage Schools. Schools welcomed the opportunity to receive Heritage Schools CPD and resources and to receive the Heritage Schools Award, having completed a Museum in Your Classroom project. Schools valued the reputation of the Historic England brand which was an added incentive for them to take part.

The Key Stage 1 pupils at St Joseph’s have increased their knowledge of the history & the natural history of Albert Park. The project provided opportunities for intergenerational learning through showcasing their project work at the exhibition in school. It enabled their families to find out more about what the children had learned, as well as learning more themselves about Albert Park, the project encouraged the pupils to talk to their parents and grandparents at home about what they knew of Albert Park’s history.

Teachers at St Joseph’s now have the skills and resources to teach local history and geography in more depth, and will be using them across the year groups.

The re-design of the local curriculum which many Middlesbrough schools use, because of the new OFSTED emphasis on a broad and balanced curriculum, opens up the opportunity for schools to use local heritage in their teaching, and the collaboration between Museum in Your Classroom and Heritage Schools can support them effectively to do this through providing training, advice and resources.

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