Meet the Team

Hi, I’m Jess Schofield, and I’m the lead researcher for the project. I’ll be leading the workshops. I am a white woman in my mid twenties. I’m short, I have brown curly hair, and I’m wearing glasses with dark green lenses. 

These glasses help me with my visual stress. Visual stress can make it difficult for me to read and it can make certain lighting conditions really uncomfortable and tiring.

I also have dyslexia. Which affects my reading, writing and processing speed. So, whilst I really enjoy visiting museums and heritage sites, it takes me a long time to read the panels of information and my brain gets tired quickly.

I also have tics, these are sudden movements of my head or arms that I can’t control. They can include clapping and whistling, but I don’t say words when I tic. I don’t expect to have many tics during the workshops, but I like to let people know so that it isn’t surprising.

I’m a PhD student at the University of York and these workshops will form part of my PhD research. I am interested in finding out more about the process of working with a group of people to design an experience. Particularly in the context of accessibility, immersive audio and heritage. 

I’m really excited to meet you at the workshops.

Hiya, I'm Kim Steele and I'll be working as a research assistant for the workshops. I'll be assisting Jess to run things and I'll be making some notes throughout the workshops.

I'm a white woman in my mid 30s. I'm pretty tall and my hair is quite long. Usually, it's blonde or purple depending on how recently I've seen my hairdresser. I have a chunky nose ring. I wear reading glasses and most of my wardrobe is black.

Like Jess, I'm dyslexic. For me, this mostly affects my processing speed and my ability to remember things like facts.

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and I'm still learning how that kind of shows up for me.

I'm a PhD student at the University of York. My PhD research is pretty different from this project. I spend most of my time trying to work out why it's quite difficult to sing whilst wearing headphones.

I'm helping with this project because I'm passionate about accessibility. I don't often visit heritage sites or museums because I don't find them to be the most accessible spaces for me.

I'm looking forward to meeting all of you at the workshops.

Hello, my name is Andy Woods and I'm Head of Collections and Research for York Museums Trust.

York Museums Trust are the charity who run the Yorkshire Museum, York Castle Museum, York Art Gallery and Museum Gardens. My role is to manage the team who care for and share the collections across those various museums and gallery. So my team look after collections ranging from fine art to archaeology,

Social history to natural science, and I head up that team.

During the session, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about St. Mary's Abbey. So I'll start by kind of giving you a general sense of the Abbey, a little bit about kind of the important date, when it was founded and the like, and talk about why and when it was founded, talk a little bit about what life was like in the Abbey, and then finally finish up by talking about the end of it or its dissolution.

Having given you a general overview. I'll talk a little bit about some of the structures that you can see of it. So those will be from some of the maps and some of the plans, and we'll use some reconstruction images, so drawings or images that kind of give you a sense of what it was like back when it was in use.

Following that, we'll do a tour of what you can see. And this will happen both inside and outside the Yorkshire Museum. So this might take about 15 minutes or so, and you'll move around inside the museum to start with, and there's level access to everything we're going to see there. And then after that, we will move outside. And again, there is level access, but it is, it's outside. So if it's raining, we'll get a little bit wet. We won't be going anywhere off the paths within the gardens or anything like that. And we can adapt any part of that for any access needs. So please just let me know.

For those of you who are joining the session digitally rather than in person, we'll do a digital version of the same. I'll show you some of the images of the buildings and of the spaces that I will be talking about, rather than physically taking you around them. I'll describe what they are and what they mean. I'm going to show you the key buildings of the Abbey, not all of it. But if you need to know any more about anything else, I'm very happy to answer those questions. Following that tour, either in person or digitally, we'll then look at some of the objects in the museum collection that were used in the Abbey. And we have lots of those in the collection, and some of those are on display, and I'll show you maybe four or five of the key ones.

When we've finished that tour, either physical or virtual, I'll come back and describe it briefly some of the ways we've interpreted the Abbey, some of the stories that we've told and how we've done so both within the museum and in the gardens. 

And then lastly, because I'll never be able to cover everything you might be interested in,I'll be very happy to take questions from you at the end. And I'll say now that there are there are no silly questions. Every time I do a talk like this for anyone, people ask me something that I don't know the answer to. And that's really exciting. And so please come with questions, anything that is sparked by what I might say or anything you might want to be interested in let me know. I'll do my best to answer that and if I can't, I'll follow up with you afterwards. 

I look forward to meeting you all in a few weeks time.