Day One – At the Botanic Garden: Badgers and Bamboo

Day one of the residency began with the children setting off on an adventure into the Garden. The children investigated the bamboo forest, and then talked about a badger footprint spotted in the mud. There were also activities on fallen leaves and minibeasts.

Day Two – The Fitzwilliam Museum: Caterpillars and Creepy Crawlies

Activities on day two linked back to day one, with discussions surrounding mini beasts and images of them throughout the museum. The children used their spotter guides from the Botanic Garden to find insects and other animals in the Flower Paintings Gallery. The book ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ was used as a tool to help children think about life cycles of insects. Later, children explored a range of materials such as clay in the studio.

Day Three – At the Fitzwilliam Museum: Gruffalos and graphite sticks

Clay was built on further on day three, and children began by appreciating the ceramics collection together. One of the pieces – an owl-shaped punch bowl, was used as a jumping off point for the book The Gruffalo. The children then proceeded to work with more clay, paper and paint to explore a range of making opportunities.

Day Four – At the Botanic Garden: Lots of Leaves

The children explored the glasshouses and enjoyed the varied environments, as a continuation of the theme of exploration and discovery of the natural world. The book ‘Tidy’ was used to inspire the children in their collection of leaves and other fallen treasures. The children were then encouraged to follow their own interests in the Schools Garden, which included playing with leaves, working with clay, and mark-making with chalk.

Day Five – At the Fitzwilliam Museum: Bear Hunts and Bare Feet

The children were allowed to vote on where to spend their final day, and chose the museum. A range of French Impressionist paintings were used to help recreate Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s book ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’. The children were familiar with the book, and joined in with the words and actions. They then went on to interact with features of the museum itself, such as the staircases, revolving doors, and ceilings.

Later, the studio offered a range of sensory experiences for the children, including a pool with floating scented water lilies, and painting on bare feet to leave tracks.

Staff at both the Botanic Gardens and the Museum will be reviewing the data collected and investigating more about how children learn in special places such as museums and Botanic Gardens. They will be writing and blogging about their findings over the coming months, and you can keep up to date with these by following the link to the blog, at the top of this article.

Photographs property of University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Gardens, taken from: https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2017/11/09/my-nursery-is-at-the-museum-and-garden/

In October 2017, nine children from a Cambridge City Nursery spent five consecutive mornings ‘In Residence’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Cambridge University Botanic Garden. The residency formed the basis of a multi-disciplinary practitioner-led research project by a team of museum, garden and nursery practitioners. We hoped that the residency would give us the opportunity to ‘stand aside for a while and leave room for learning’, as Malaguzzi describes above. We hoped to develop a better understanding of what the museum and garden offers to young learners by working in partnership to create opportunities for them to explore our spaces and collections. We were also interested in sharing and developing good practice within each of our settings.

What did we discover about working with young children in the Fitzwilliam Museum and Botanic Garden?

· The case studies revealed that even the very youngest children care deeply about museum and garden collections. There are many examples within the data we collected of children forming deep and personal connections with the objects they encountered. They also demonstrated a sensitivity to issues of display, preservation and conservation

· Transitional objects such as learning journals, sketchbooks and small world toys enabled children and practitioners to make links and build bridges between the different settings

· The case studies enabled us to identify challenges and contradictions within our practice which might have otherwise gone unnoticed. This highlighted the potential of detailed empirical research of this kind to help practitioners to acknowledge their blind spots

· The nursery staff took ideas and approaches they observed as part of the residency back to their setting so that other children could experience and benefit from them

· Although the focus of the project was on a small group of children, the impact on the practitioners and University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) learning programmes promises a wider impact. It will be interesting to reflect on this in the future

· The writing up process has enabled us to engage in professional dialogues with educators from multiple disciplines and also to understand how our work relates to current academic thinking in this area

· This project has enabled us to better understand and articulate the potential of collaborative practitioner-led research in informal learning contexts. This represents a significant area for future development.

What next?

This project points the way for the potential of gardens and cultural providers to support the education sector to develop a creative, embedded and community-led approach to professional and curriculum development. Feedback from the nursery practitioners demonstrated how they had been inspired and refreshed by the project. Sabbatical placements are one of the suggestions put forward in a recent government consultation (Department of Education, 2018) about how to improve teachers’ professional career development. We would like to make the case for other practitioners and children to have the opportunity to undertake projects of this kind. We were extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to work with a small group of children in such an in depth and sustained way. Although we acknowledge the limitations of our project, the residency provided the project team with the opportunity to step back, to observe and to think deeply about our practice. The process of discussing, reflecting and writing has taken over six months to complete. All members of the project team have been actively involved in commenting on and contributing to the end of project report. This experience will now inform the development our training programmes for practitioners from different settings.

The case studies remind us that young children are capable and intelligent citizens who have important contributions to make to our shared spaces and places. As specialist educators and practitioner researchers we are in a unique position to witness and document the complex, multi-dimensional creative learning that takes place in shared informal learning spaces. We hope that this project demonstrates that young children have an important contribution to make as citizens now, not just as adults of the future. This extended residency has enabled us to pause and take note of children’s multiple voices and perspectives and in so doing offer enable them to contribute to and develop the ways in which we work with our collections. Young children can and should be given opportunities to take an active and participatory role within our museums and collections.

You can download the full report here.