Teacher Training at the Oriental Museum 4
On the 7th of March, Floris and Oliver once again went to the Oriental Museum in Durham in order to run the teacher training day for Durham University School for Education’s PGCE students as part of a continued collaboration with the University’s Library and Collections Learning and Engagement team. This is part of an ongoing project that we hope will become a central part of the trainee-teachers’ experience, while also continuing to develop our cooperation with the wonderful team at the Durham Oriental Museum.
Together with the fantastic Ross Wilkinson, the ULC’s learning and engagement manager, we ran a total of four sessions for the day, with Ross leading two and us leading two. In the first of the two sessions run by us, students got the opportunity to explore the museum in order to envisage it as a learning space. Not only did we encourage them to embody the experience of their future pupils by ‘discovering’ languages, we also encouraged them to think of potential issues they might encounter when teaching diverse groups of students. It was a lot of fun to see the students place themselves in the shoes of their future pupils by copying and embodying the languages whilst learning about their relations and chronologies.
Our second session focussed on using a variety of museum spaces to create learning activities. Firstly, we highlighted the enriched experience of involving museum staff and how their knowledge and enthusiasm can aid in student learning. However, as this is not always an option, we followed this up by showing them how to create their own teaching and learning activities based around the theme of migration and technological exchange. As always it was a pleasure to see the creative and varying ideas the students came up with.
We received brilliant feedback from the students, who felt that the day had made them more confident about taking their students to museums in the future and stated that they planned to incorporate museum-based learning in their teaching.
All in all, it was an exciting and productive day and we wish all the students all the best in their upcoming placements!