<p>CELT | Good Practice Exchange www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/good_practice</p><p>Transcript for Collaborating with MMU Special Collections: A New Manchester Alphabet Iris Feint, Louise Clennell & Ian Whadcock</p><p>Iris Feint: ‘My name is Iris Feindt. I'm a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant.’</p><p>Louise Clennell: ‘I'm Louise Clennell. I'm the Education and Outreach Officer for MMU Special Collections.’</p><p>Ian Whadcock: ‘I'm Ian Whadcock and I'm a Senior Lecturer in Illustration and Animation.’</p><p>LC: ‘So, about 2 years before the 'We Built This City' exhibition was launched, I was asked to come up with some ideas for projects that could involve students from across the university. While I was doing that research, I came across a really lovely, quite modest little pamphlet that was called 'A Manchester Alphabet'. And it was written and illustrated by a gentleman called Roger Oldham, and he had created an alphabet of Edwardian Manchester; so it was people, places, things that he had created poems and illustrated those poems to make a really charming, humorous little booklet. And I immediately knew that this was the booklet that I wanted to base the project around. </p><p>Now, because I had worked with the School of Writing and the School of Art previously on 'Crimelines and Timelines', I took the book to them and showed it to their staff with the suggestion that we should do a contemporary update of a Manchester Alphabet, and invite our students to create a new set of poems and a new set of illustrations based on their experiences of Manchester.’</p><p>IF: ‘It seemed like a really good idea to ask our poetry students from the MA and poetry at the Manchester Writing School if they would like to come up with some poetry. Ian then became involved because obviously we needed images and any excuse to work with the School of Art is always great because we work so well together.’</p><p>IW: ‘What it enables for the student is an opportunity to work without trying to predict what it is they think I want from the course. [IF: Yes] They start to be themselves. They feel permission to be themselves. It brings students together in a very different way and I think it creates a sense of belonging to the course and belonging to the university which goes outside of the definition of a course programme or a relationship with a particular tutor. And I think a lot of this is about confidence building, and I think that is confidence for us as well. I think we gain confidence by saying actually we can make this happen, we can create these publications, and that they are difficult to achieve, logically difficult. But they have a life once they exist which is really important in helping us tell the story of the courses that we are on, telling the story of the university, and I think telling the students’ story, more importantly than anything else.’</p><p>[What has been the value of working with MMU Special Collections?]</p><p>IF: ‘I will take them here, and Louise usually prepares some objects, some artist books, and they are completely blown away by it because they just didn’t know this existed. And I don't know why that is CELT | Good Practice Exchange www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/good_practice it. It is such a shame because they always get so much out of it. It makes them write things, stories, poems that they wouldn't otherwise have written and I think that it really interesting and it is a shame we don’t do more of it.’ </p><p>IW: ‘What I like about having an agenda set within Special Collections for this is that it created a kind of due reverence for the original publication but a clear desire to create something which was ambitious and contemporary. I think those... that resistance and the tensions that happen within a client-publishing relationship are quite hard to replicate and I think this is a nice little model.’</p><p>IF: ‘Absolutely.’</p><p>IW: ‘It does, I think, make them realise that archives are living resources.’</p><p>LC: ‘Once the book had been published that not the end of A Manchester Alphabet's journey. In this year, I've been working with students from the undergraduate History course. We've also been working with 8 primary schools from around Manchester, in partnership with Historic England. So it is project that keeps on growing \and I think that is the beauty of Special Collections. Although we are talking this morning about working with staff within the faculty of humanities and the faculty of School of Art, that people can come in and make links with Special Collections regardless of what discipline they are studying. Because there is always a way to explore that and use it in a way that can enrich students’ learning and enhance the teaching and learning experience.’</p>