1st Jul 2010 - 2nd Jul 2010
Sallis Benney Theatre
The conference aimed to provide a forum for debate of issues and ideas that were relevant to the museum and higher education sectors. It brought together policy makers, curators, educators, academics, students and leading professionals from the educational, creative and cultural sectors. Minister for Culture and Creative Industries Ed Vaizey and Roy Clare, CEO of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, where amongst our keynote speakers.
We were delighted by the international response to our call for papers, the interest in the subject and the issues raised. Papers presented on day one responded to the themes below, and offered a critical perspective of museum and higher education (HE) policy and practice and make recommendations for future practice.
We also received significantly more case studies than we had envisaged and therefore decided to share and discuss some of these and our collective experiences and what to do next during a networking event on day two.
Recent thinking by the UK government on the delivery of cultural policy and strategy has acknowledged the vital role that museums occupy in supporting and enhancing cultural and educational provision both regionally and nationally (DCMS 2008). In this context work with schools and community groups has received particular attention (Anderson 2004, Berry 1998, Hooper-Greenhill 1994) yet the enormous potential of museums working with HE remains under-explored, under-researched and the needs of higher education students and citizen scholars are often overlooked by museums.
Research conducted by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD) has highlighted the significant potential and importance of museum-university collaborations and the need to identify successful practices and also barriers that prevent institutions from working together more effectively. With limited public funding available for interdisciplinary educational research, CETLD has made the case for a national review of the opportunities that museum-university partnerships offer and how the needs of higher education students and adult learners can better be supported in museums.
The conference aimed to provide a forum for debate surrounding the policy implications of this work and a platform for discussion of issues and ideas that are relevant to the museum and higher education sectors. It brought together policy makers, curators, educators, academics, students and leading professionals from the educational, creative and cultural sectors.
Interested parties from both the HE and the museums sector gathered for the networking event on 2 July 2010. There was engaged discussion about the first day and how the research could be developed in future. As part of this the group brainstormed for a number of funding and network sources and the results are mapped onto the visualisation below:
