Paper 1: Cultural Venues and Creative Cross-Curricular Teaching and Learning

Karen Hosack Janes

The principle of universal free access to museums and galleries in the UK has a long tradition, with many education programmes focusing on widening the demographic of in-person and online visitors. One such programme unites Oxford Brookes School of Education and 16 cultural venues in and around Oxford. Aiming to help teacher training students experience learning beyond the classroom, a 3-4 day ‘cultural placement’ at a venue is an integrated element of the BA(Hons) Primary Education course. This includes students producing an assessed learning resource; a selection of which are displayed this year in an online exhibition.

This paper looks at how the Oxford Brookes cultural placements have evolved from firstly being part of a National/Regional Museums Education Partnership project in 2003, led by the National Gallery, London. Considered, is to what extent and in what ways the three key objectives of the partnership have been fulfilled, 17 years on. These were: To promote the use of museums and galleries in creative cross-curricular teaching and learning; support trainee teachers' development of pedagogy and practice in using a visual stimulus; and build sustainable links between regional museums, galleries, local Initial Teacher Training providers and local primary schools.

Concluding, the paper proposes that to gain a fuller understanding of how the cultural placements help to shape students' pedagogy and practice, an in-depth analysis is needed of (i) student experiences, (ii) venue staff experiences, and (iii) the impact of a cultural placement on the professional practice of former students. The paper looks forward to a study being undertaken by Dr Hosack Janes with Jane Fletcher, Senior lecturer in Education at Oxford Brookes and third year lead on the BA(Hons) Primary Education course, focusing on student experiences of the 2019/2020 cultural placements. It is hoped that funding can be identified to undertake the other elements of the research.

Paper 2: Layers of Reading: An Ecological Exploration of White Horse Hill

Nick Swarbrick and Mat Tobin

Rosemary Sutcliff's Sun Horse Moon Horse is an historical novel for children which imagines the creation of the White Horse at Uffington and the fate of its creator. Mat Tobin and Nick Swarbrick are presenting on recent visits to Uffington using her novel as the focus, exploring four layers of reading - text; place-based scholarship; the physical experience; psychological insights. Using Mat's analysis of the linguistic features of the White Horse environment (a core element of his PhD) as well as material from Nick's work in Outdoor Learning we will look at how fiction set in a specific landscape might be read differently when undertaken in conjunction with a visit to the physical setting

Paper 3: Unlearning/relearning through practice based pedagogies

A virtual workshop with Rachel Payne

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