Tag Archives: King’s College London

Museum of London: Digging deeper into London’s history

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Vyki Sparkes, Curator of Social and Working History, with some of this year’s students at Museum of London Docklands

Sarah Castle, Higher Education Programme Manager at the Museum of London, and Beatrice Behlen, Senior Curator for Fashion & Decorative Arts, reflect on a memorable collaboration between the museum and King’s Summer Programmes.

‘Curating the City: 1900 to now’ is a course of two complementary halves; a morning of academic teaching at King’s on the Strand, followed by an afternoon going behind-the-scenes, exploring galleries and handling objects with curators at the Museum of London. Armed with the theory and critical insight provided by the lead tutor at King’s, students immediately get to see this theory put into practice as curators discuss both the art and science involved in curating the city of London.

This course introduces undergraduate students from a wide range of disciplines to a subject area largely unfamiliar to them. This year, courses being studied at home institutions ranged from Medicine to Industrial Design and from Information Engineering to Medicine. Students who wouldn’t usually learn together were united in their desire to find out more about the workings of a social history museum and to dig deeper into London’s history. ‘In-class’ and ‘at-museum’ discussions and activities meant that students got to hear the perspectives and opinions of classmates from countries and cultures often very different from their own. This year, we welcomed students from India, China, the US, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and the UK.

We know from feedback that students love the hands-on aspects of the course and alternating lectures with activities at the museum; with comments such as ‘It is very different from anything I’ve ever done’ and ‘the curators were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful’ being common. But what do we at the museum like best about this collaboration? Above all, it is great to watch the students grow in confidence throughout the three weeks; confidence not only in asking questions, navigating the city, and understanding the collection and display decisions which museum professionals must make, but also confidence in thinking about objects. From the overriding desire in week 1 to simply identify what an object is, to a more reflective and interrogative approach to the material culture by week 3. As they develop skills of observing, touching and contextualising, so you see students’ faces light up as they begin to experience the very same passion for objects which is shared by all our curators.

Now in its 7th year, this Summer Programme continues to attract enthusiastic and industrious students who really appreciate and embrace the uniqueness of the teaching experience on offer. One of this year’s students commented: ‘If you love history and talking about historical artefacts, you’ll love this course’. We at the museum say: ‘If you love history and talking about historical artefacts, we’ll love having you on this course!’ Looking forward to welcoming next year’s cohort of London-curious students already…

Comings and Goings

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summer

Dr Sarah Williamson, Director of Summer Programmes, talks about the start of King’s Summer Programmes in London.

We love the summer!  Normal work closes down.  People get out and about more and enjoy longer, slower days.  There seems to be more time and more energy for life outside of the everyday.  When I took this job, I did so knowing that my summers were about to change. Instead of heading away from London or catching a plane out of the UK on holiday, summer would become my busiest work time and I would spend it in London. But somehow I knew that working over the summer would not be like working at another time of the year.  Summer is magical.  Summer is special.  Summer can’t help but be full of possibilities! And so that has turned out to be true (lucky for me otherwise this would be a very different blog!).

London in the summer is an incredible place to be and two weeks ago, 364 Undergraduate Summer School students arrived on campus to experience it for themselves.  From Brexit debates on a boat trip down the Thames at sunset to Royal Parks with and without umbrellas.  Each day is different but all of them start with hard graft.  Some summer students kick start their London days in world-changing bio laboratories (drug discovery, cancer research, stem cells research, forensic science) and end them in west end shows and east end pubs.  Others spend their waking hours studying London history and handling artefacts at the Museum of London on the Curating the City course.  Then there are those working to understand human rights law – never more fundamental to our world than now with the profound migrant crisis in Europe brought about by displaced people from conflict zones like Syria.   You don’t get more cutting edge learning than in the Friday masterclasses taught by the United Nations Refugee Agency! And frankly, to my mind there’s no point studying in one of the world’s most global of metropolises without drawing on the full community resources available and at King’s that means learning from practitioners as well as our academics.  Practitioners in all senses, since next session some visiting students will have made quite an incredible journey to the classroom: ten will be recipients of summer scholarships, gifted by King’s Summer Programmes to refugees that the UN Refugee Agency is supporting.

Two weeks in, everyone has had a proper taste of the sheer size and diversity of the great city of London with all its hearts, minds and spirits operating at 100mph. Before they know it, it will be time to leave.  And who could have predicted that they will have been in town at just the moment that Britain gets a new Prime Minister and its second woman leader.  Times they are a changing and I know 364 visitors to the capital who saw it all happen first hand…

 

‘Google cannot find your slippers in the Temple’

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Diana

Dr Diana Bozhilova, Teaching Fellow Summer Programmes, brings her lively discussions on the theory and practice of International Relations to our London programmes and to India through her annual contribution to the King’s Summer School Programmes in Delhi and Mumbai.

The Summer School should be fun but also achieve interpersonal growth and fire up passion for higher education. Amidst young people’s busy lives, it should bring about such outcomes with speed and panache, most certainly, it should be a substantive variation on information available via Wiki, FB, Twitter, et cetera. So, what is it like to teach faced with such challenges?

I teach Politics and International Relations and my experience has shown that the humanities encourage creativity. I still want my students to read without worry they’d be called nerds if they do so also in the summer. A vital tool of Summer School teaching is the practice of the subject. My students partake in daily strategy games, such as Negotiations with DPRK; simulations, like the United Nations Security Council Reform Group; international trade games; smart city building exercises, and the rest.

My own expertise comes from constantly researching my subject. A great enabler of that is seeing my students as a focus group that literally take the pulse of the course through their comments and feedback. Because I teach international students in London and then also take Politics and IR ‘on the road’ to India, my students cover between them a substantive portion of the globe and bring together a myriad of views and expectations.

Making sense of the world is about acquiring a key skill – the ability to separate information from knowledge. As a lecturer, social media poses a tremendous challenge on how to inculcate this key skill in students, namely the separation of knowledge from information, whilst appreciating the great utility of the internet. Given the limitations of time, I see the summer programme as an opportunity not only to learn about IR but to practice it on a daily basis and thus walk away with not only the theory that one gains from a classical degree approach but also from application of it to real life events in IR.

International Relations (IR) particularly lends itself to a variety of teaching approaches. This is most relevant to how students engage with IR as a summer course, since the brevity of the programme calls for a unique method of engagement than a year long degree course otherwise would.

Lectures on IR are thus supplemented by real life simulations in the summer programme classes. One example of how this occurs in practice is presented through the very topical current discussion on the United Nations, given the forthcoming election of its next Secretary-General later this year. I contributed a recent blog on the various aspects of the process. But how does one then translate this passive information into active knowledge in the classroom?

An excellent way to engage with the lengthy calls for United Nations reform is to focus student attention on its key body, the Security Council. This then allows for the implementation of a simulation exercise modelled on the “Open Ended Group on Security Council Reform”, where students can study in depth and analyse the positions of competing powers as to whether to enlarge, level out for parity, or do away altogether with this key institution of UN decision making.

One of the most memorable sayings I heard taking my subject ‘on the road’ to India was: ‘Google cannot find your slippers in the Temple’ (which in Hindi translates into something like ‘Google Apni Chappal Mandir Se Nahi Dhoond sakta’.) With that, my students find that social media is a phenomenal way to exchange beacons, whilst the Summer School enables the connection of a great series of these to create a whole and gain a different understanding of the world altogether!