AT A GLANCE
During a 3-5 day placement, trainees will work closely with the museum collection and content to inform the development of a lesson or resource on the topic of the local area. Trainees will go on to pilot their lessons within their 2nd and 3rd school placements and be able to use the museum as a resource and venue for extending the classroom learning.
ITT PROVIDER
SCITT was established in 1996 and offer a 3-7s and 5-11s PGCE (validated by Kingston University and includes 600 Master's level credits) with QTS. Based in Wandsworth they are a consortium of 15 primary schools and link with many local nurseries and the three Children's Centres. A focus on creativity and cross-curricular work has been a hallmark of SCITT’s provision.
SETTING
The Wandsworth Museum has new Permanent and Temporary Galleries and a newly refurbished Learning & Research Centre. The Learning & Research Centre is a self-contained space, with two classrooms, a research library and spaces to exhibit pupils’ work. School groups are able to book visits to the new galleries and workshops as part of the annual subscription to the museum education programming.
The exhibits highlight the history of the Wandsworth region and can be viewed as a tapestry held together with three distinct “threads”, each interweaving with the others to create a unique story spanning 25,000 years. These threads are the Natural Landscape, the Cultural Landscape and the Human Story, and are depicted in our permanent gallery illustrated by objects from our rich collections.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
Aims for the SCITT Trainees:
- A better understanding of the resources local cultural institutions contain and the way they can be used to enrich learning.
- A greater understanding of using diverse resources in and out of the classroom.
Aims for Mentors:
- To access the museum resources and explore possible new topics, exploring the way that their school may link in with local heritage in the future.
Aims for the Lead partners:
- Wandsworth will gain a better understanding of how they can use their existing resources to inspire teaching in new and exciting ways. Wandsworth Museum will develop a link with new teachers and improve their relationship with the Wandsworth Primary Schools' Consortium.
- Wandsworth Primary Schools' Consortium hope to be able to offer a museum placement as part of course structure going forward, this project aims to see how a museum placement can be structured into students’ course schedule.
Aims for additional museum and archive partners:
- To link with local schools so that teachers are more aware of the kinds of resources and breadth of knowledge they house. Make them more aware of the way new teachers are engaging with the curriculum and teaching the topic of local area.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Local area has been chosen as the main theme as this project because it is the basis of the all of the museum content. The Primary Curriculum review was proposed by the labour government and although it was not approved it stated that local area should be in the early and middle stages of learning as children need to understand themselves and their local environments before they look further afield.
During a 3-5 day placement, trainees will work closely with the museum collection and content to inform the development of a lesson or resource on the topic of the local area. Museum educators will be on hand to help trainees access museum resources and lead them to points for further research and for the first day of the placement will be supported by their school mentors. Throughout placements trainees will be able to focus on one theme within the topic of local area or may choose to focus on one object within the collection. Trainees with the support from their mentors will be responsible for planning their lesson/project and mapping the content and skills to the national curriculum.
OUTCOMES
The Wandsworth Museum has benefited from the expertise the trainee teachers have brought and their projects can be used as an evaluative mechanism indicating how the museum can help all teachers in the borough teach topics relating to local area.
The main curriculum subjects chosen for the project were History and Art with a focus on the local area. Trainees and consortium school teachers were encouraged to consider ways of linking these to Geography, Citizenship and Scienve and thier evaluations and lesson observations prove this to be the case. Several trainees have visited the Wandsworth Museum with thier placement classes since thier time here and successfully used our collection as an extedned resource to the classroom learning.
The partnership between Wandsworth Museum and Wandsworth Primary Schools Constortium SCITT will continue in the upcoming school year. The structure of the placement will be adapted to workshop days where trainees can observe museum sessions and gallery tours, access the handling collection and resource centre and participate in local guided walks.
