Finding the Reel London

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Joana Correia

Untitled design (32)

My experience as a tutor with the King’s Undergraduate Summer School programme is very much a privileged one. Each year I am fortunate enough to return to meet a new batch of extremely talented students, who have travelled from all over the world to come to study at the college. Their level of enthusiasm and willingness to explore every crevice of a London that will be there home for 3 (and sometimes 6) weeks never ceases to amaze. Every new class is a force of nature, and it is a pleasure to see individuals forge new friendships against the backdrop of this great city, many often returning over the subsequent months to reacquaint themselves with their favourite landmark, outdoor park or coffee shop. For my part, my Summer School experience allows me to indulge my love of cinema and my home city by teaching the popular London and Film course. This class starts on the big screen and moves outwards, examining London’s “cinematic” qualities and the many forms that it takes across a range of films. Sitting right on the Thames and within walking distance to its most famous landmarks, King’s College’s is the perfect place to map the capital’s shifting cinematic landscape, and to see how it has been portrayed by a host of homegrown and international filmmakers.

However, not only does the London and Film course offer an introduction to London’s cinematic history, or give an insight into the capital’s vibrant film culture (with the Cinema Museum, British Film Institute and London Film Museum all close by). This is a course that has also actively shifted the direction of my own teaching and research. The London-focus of the module’s case study films has broadened my own intellectual horizons and introduced me to new hidden gems that I am able to combine with my undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Guided by the knowledge of the Summer School students who bring the names of their favourite London-set films with them as they enter the college for the first time, I now seek out unknown and sometimes lost London titles. It is these odd and offbeat titles that find their way into courses I continue to teach here at King’s, their presence on modules a testament to the input of past Summer School students whose passing comment about ‘that film set in Covent Garden’ thankfully left an enduring imprint.

The global reach of the Summer School attracts students with their own diverse ideas of an imaginary London dreamt up in the media. My London is not your London, and while we may all share a romanticised idea of what the capital might be (home to James Bond, Mary Poppins and Bridget Jones perhaps), each film and each student has the potential to remake the city anew. Perhaps expectedly, I have lost track over the number of discussions I have had with my Summer School classes over whether it is the Harry Potter version of London, or the one glimpsed in Love Actually, that is more accurate and appealing. With this year’s Summer School 2017 fast approaching, it will soon be time to have these debates all over again. And I can’t wait.

By Dr Christopher Holliday

Learning from the City: Summer School Influences on Undergraduate Teaching

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Joana Correia

family history blog image (1)

Having spent most of my life in London, I have come to realise how much this city has to teach us: not just in its vast array of museums (from National Galleries to pop-up exhibitions), but also through our everyday interactions with the city’s streets and citizens. When I took over the Literature in the City module, I wanted to draw on London as a tool to enhance our classroom experience.

I therefore decided to map the literature we studied onto the spaces they described. Virginia Woolf’s walk down the Strand, Charles Dickens’s encounters in St. Giles, W.B. Yeats’s melancholy on Fleet Street, all these spaces are central to the text we study. These writers create a window into a rich and deeply imagined terrain, and it is one that is right outside the main entrance to King’s. Encountering these spaces in conjunction with the literature itself, offers not only a deep sense of what this writing is trying to express, but also – and, perhaps, more crucially – just how much London has evolved!

There is a creative element to all our wanderings through the city – James Joyce certainly discovered as much in his journeys through Dublin – and so I actively encourage students to record their experience of the sites we visit. We pause at our locations, writing personal responses that capture the similarities and differences with the literature we have studied. ‘If we turn and go past the anchored ships towards London’, do we still see what Woolf called ‘the most dismal prospect in the world’? For some, contemporary London’s glass skyline reiterates Woolf’s point. For others it shows a glowing metropolis and a global icon.

One of the final essay questions is designed to critically evaluate these creative encounters. It was a mode of assessment I adapted from some undergraduate teaching at King’s. But this summer school has also informed my wider teaching at the University – not least in opening up the classroom. While our timetable directs us to the lecture hall, what better way to learn about, say, the London Blitz than by scouring the city for its legacy? (Bloomsbury, you should know, has a lot to offer!) Probing through the layers of London’s history is often a difficult task, but the places such as the Museum of London are filled with objects that can help to resurrect the past.

It is because of these experiences on the summer school, that the mantra “the city is my classroom” has become a recurrent phrase in so much of my teaching at King’s. Be it through explorations in disused tube stations or trips to the Black Cultural Archives, getting out into the city has become integral to my ability to teach the complexities and changes London has to offer.

By Dr George Legg

Summer School: Beyond Shakespeare in London

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Joana Correia

Back in 2009, King’s College London took the then courageous step to begin an Undergraduate Summer School. It was a leap in the dark and we started from nothing. At the time, the expectation was, quite unsurprisingly, that this was mainly going to be a programme for the North American market to suit their study abroad needs. In that first year our most important course was Shakespeare in London. Much has changed since then.

Shakespeare in London reflected what our summer school students were meant to be: a mainly western audience who would welcome an opportunity to visit Shakespeare’s home country; a quintessentially English hero of their own culture too. Since that summer in 2009, many hundreds of students have joined us, from places where Shakespeare is known, but also where he isn’t an integral part of the national reading culture.

We have watched the programme evolve along with our roles as international officers charged with enabling the experience. Today the King’s Undergraduate Summer School facilitates the learning of students from over 90 nations and forms a strong part of our university’s international office. We still welcome students from North America to enjoy Shakespeare, but with them come new students from China, which is now our second largest cohort.

Expanding the curriculum
Over time, we have grown to appreciate and develop the potential of a summer school, which is a most refreshing format in which to teach. We took academic quality extremely seriously when we created our programmes, and are now rewarded with a vehicle that both draws on and influences standard-format teaching for degree programmes. This is a far cry from one of the original concerns that summer teaching would disrupt or be lower grade to mainstream teaching in some way.

From offering undergraduate classes in London, we have expanded to offering a large programme in a major BRICS country, India, and diversified into high school-level courses and public engagement markets. We continue to create programmes that allow for a wide range of audiences to partake in education through short courses over the summer, whatever their individual circumstances.

Partnerships
We always keep in mind that working and thinking internationally in London does not necessarily mean working abroad. Thirty-seven percent of Londoners were born abroad, and London is such a busy and accessible travel hub, it seems as though everyone is heading or returning from somewhere.

One of our long-term partners on Summer Programmes is the city’s magnificent Museum of London. Partnering with the Museum of London was compelling for us in more ways than one. We found that a number of our students came from countries or areas in the world, where museums were in short supply or museum didactics very different. The Museum of London, with its commitment to pedagogy, was open to innovative collaboration; an element that our Summer School alumni praise highly after they have taken our course Curating the City.

Breaking boundaries
I recently bumped into one of our summer tutors in a coffee shop. She asked me whether, now that it was winter, I was busy doing another job. Like degree programming in the wider university, the summer is a year-round job to keep our modules and our content current. At King’s – which has an admirable breadth of research focusing on global issues – our team works with research colleagues all year to design summer programmes that give access to pioneering research that is destined to have a truly global impact on communities, wherever they are located in the world.

Students quite rightly don’t just want to learn about a British perspective when they come here; they are increasingly and fundamentally interested in having courses which address problems that matter to their home countries, and discuss questions that affect their and others’ lives. Our Global Health and Social Medicine course team is an example of this; indeed perhaps no subject exemplifies better how communities worldwide can and must benefit from university research.

Democratising study abroad
Summer Schools have become a useful tool for internationalisation, allowing for shorter term experiences abroad as well as with our partners in all corners of the globe. Summer schools enable more students to go abroad, to step (at least for a short time) into the shoes of their counterparts in another country. Often accused of being only available to those who can afford it (something that remains a challenge due to the element of relocation), they have also become one of the tools that has democratised study abroad.

Not every international experience is the result of choice, or can be lightly termed ‘enriching’. Western Europe is affected by profound refugee movements in our global region. At King’s, we have been collaborating very closely with the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for a number of years. UNHCR make unique contributions to our summer teaching, and together we recently have inaugurated the new Summer-at-King’s scholarships for refugees. Summer schools are a space to re-imagine yourself and can help make this re-imagination a reality; something that we are very proud to support.

Shakespeare in Mumbai
Attending a summer school is a very personal choice and that is why summer schools cannot just be about Shakespeare in London anymore. They should also be about Shakespeare in India, in the US, and in Taiwan. They should be about current issues in health care, ancient languages, and about devising technology for a better future for the poorest communities.

We are always appraising how we should diversify the portfolio to best inform and represent the global citizens our programmes attract. Our programmes are based both in London and abroad. When they are based here, our students are invited to be fully present in the moment while also acknowledging that the London cosmos is only one stop en route to their next goal in life.

Alexander is Senior Tutor Summer Programmes at King’s College London, UK.

This post was originally featured on the European Association for International Education Blog.

Professor Howard’s Summer School Journey

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Joana Correia

Untitled design (14)

I’m a passionate advocate of summer school and, I confess, an old hand. As an undergraduate, I enrolled with great excitement in my first summer class 35 years ago. As a postgraduate 10 years later, I taught my first summer course. Now I teach Theatrical London at King’s College London every summer.

So over three and half decades, as both student and professor, what key advantages and disadvantages have I observed? Why, in my view, have the benefits always outweighed any potential shortcomings?

First and most obvious, summertime is typically warmer, sunnier, and drier, enabling more excursions, field trips, and seminars outdoors. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I really appreciated learning in the open air, sitting on the grass, and swapping ideas. It helped open up conversations and seemed to open minds.

Second, because of this more relaxed informal atmosphere, I got to know my classmates better, as well as my tutors. I’ll never forget my Intercultural Communication module, when the distinguished Professor Michael Prosser arrived in khaki shorts and knee-high socks! Always friendly and self-effacing, “Mr. Prosser” literally modeled the preeminence of great ideas over high fashion, effective discussions over coat-and-tie formality.

Third, as opposed to a regular student workload of three or four modules over a three- or four-month semester, a three-week summer school course allows concentrated study of a single subject. In our internet age of shortened attention spans, this intense focus is refreshing and demanding, stretching our capacities to ascertain and assess subtle complexities of subject matter.

On the other hand, if the subject is not well crafted, tedium can set in, risking burn out. As an inexperienced young instructor in the early 1990s, I convened a summer course on the arts and literature of HIV/AIDS. Utterly worthwhile, this topic was nonetheless deeply depressing before the advent of antiretroviral therapies, since for most, diagnosis meant sure death. Indeed, despite the heroism of a select few doctors, epidemiologists, writers, artists, and activists, the death tolls over this period were staggering—and potentially intellectually paralyzing.

However, fourth, this kind of deep engagement, I’ve learned, works especially well with inherently diversified topics. For instance, British playwriting and London stage productions address such a broad range of themes as to perpetually rejuvenate readers and challenge audiences. This means that in addition to the traditional concerns with dramatic form, poetic language, stage performance, and the like, Theatrical London examines the varied, complex even puzzling topics of the critically-acclaimed plays we read and see, including gender, sexuality, ethnic conflict, nuclear warfare, and terrorism, to name just a few.

In sum, I’ve found that the unique combination of concentrated single-subject study in a sunny relaxed environment works wonders. Whereas the campus proper may be a bit calmer than usual (providing excellent quiet spaces for reading and research), the streets of London are never busier, always beckoning to bright students.

Immersive. Intensive. Informal. Ideal!

Keep it Real: Success in Project-Based Learning, Part II: Challenges and Solutions

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Joana Correia

Untitled design (13)

“We want our colleagues to embrace this new way of teaching, and we know that can’t happen if we place too much of a burden on them.”

There are several challenges, both pedagogic and motivational, in successfully implementing a PBL approach. The team behind the Engineering: Creating Technologies that Help People module in the summer school have had to keep these are the forefront of our thinking when designing the module.

The main pedagogic challenges are timetabling PBL modules, allocating teaching resources and deciding on assessment methods. Instructors unused to the approach often face a steep learning curve and, structurally, university departments may struggle to allocate sufficient staffing resources to the PBL stream, particularly in the early stages of adoption when the majority of instruction continues to be offered via the more-traditional large-scale lecture. Proper planning – and the allocation of sufficient resources to planning – in advance of the launch of a new PBL stream is essential, as is continued monitoring of the impact of PBL on instructor workload once the stream has launched. We want our colleagues to embrace this new way of teaching, and we know that can’t happen if we place too much of a burden on them.

The main motivational challenge is getting students who arrive at university having only received information-transfer based instruction to actively engage with this new approach to learning. For example, a team from Dublin Institute of Technology examined the student experience of a PBL module offered as part of the 1^st year of one of their undergraduate engineering courses.¹ The module had two competitions, an intermediate competition at the midpoint and a second at the end; and the Dublin team found that students did not really commit to the PBL approach until the date of the first competition approached i.e. until the very last moment.

“When examining what reasons students give for feeling motivated by a project, one of the themes that comes up most often is “authenticity”.”

The Dublin PBL module was centred on creating a robot to take part in a Sumo wrestling contest (the second competition). However, when examining what reasons students give for feeling motivated by a project, one of the themes that comes up most often is “authenticity” – having a real-world problem to solve. The table below, taken from a Finnish study² of two projects assigned to IT students, summarises the findings of three earlier studies that touched on motivational factors. Taking out the aspects centred on the team-based project aspects common to all PBL, we have factors related to the “real world” – authenticity, and, related to this, the existence and participation of a client.

At the same time, the Finnish study found that there two project teams sometimes felt pressured by having to meet the expectations of the client and tackle a real-world problem [that they may see as intractable]. It is here where support from the instructor/advisor is key providing context, encouragement and helping the students focus on achievable goals and maintaining a good working relationship with the client.

“The role of the instructor/advisor is to support the student with encouragement and context”

So these are the factors we’ve had to think about in putting together our Engineering module. And with these in mind we’ve designed a learning experience centred on bringing together students and clients to solve real-world problems. Project-Based Learning is a powerful tool for helping deliver knowledgeable students who are active in pursuit of their own learning, but the choice of project is key to triggering engagement with an approach that the student will likely be entirely unfamiliar-with upon arrival; keeping it real delivers that engagement. At the same time, we recognise that the authenticity of the scenario can also prove daunting. So we’ve recruited a team of instructor/advisors ready to support the student with encouragement and context, giving them the confidence to make this leap from the classroom into the real world.

“We need to make sure that in keeping it real, we don’t also make it miserable.”

And there is one last thing we know we need to get right: we need to make sure that in keeping it real, we don’t also make it miserable. I think Beau Lotto, neuroscientist and expert on perception said it best: “Uncertainty is what makes play fun. Right? It’s adaptable to change. Right? It opens possibility, and it’s cooperative. It’s actually how we do our social bonding, and it’s intrinsically motivated. What that means is that we play to play. Play is its own reward.

“Now if you look at these five ways of being, these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist. If you add rules to play, you have a game. That’s actually what an experiment is.” Beau Lotto, TED Talk “Science is for Everyone, Kids Included” 06/12

References

Duffy et al “Student Experiences of a Project-based Learning Module” 41^st SEFI Conference 2013
Hilvonen and Ovaska “Student Motivation in Project-Based Learning”, International Conference on Engaging Pedagogy, 2010

Keep it Real: Success in Project-Based Learning, Part I: What is PBL?

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Joana Correia

Dr Jamie Barras, Informatics Teaching Fellow at King’s College London

“I’m a big believer in learning by doing”

I’m a big believer in learning by doing. That’s why I’ve joined the team who are bringing Project-based learning (PBL) to the 2017 King’s Summer School with the module Engineering: Creating Technologies that Help People. In PBL, students, generally working in small groups, are presented with a problem to solve or task to complete and allowed to work out for themselves the best way to go about doing that – including what knowledge they will need to acquire in order to succeed. The instructor acts primarily as an advisor and support, stepping in to guide the student(s) only if they lose their way.

PBL has many attractions; it allows students to take ownership of their learning experience, encourages a broad-based approach to acquiring skills both technical and non-technical and fosters a co-operative outlook to making progress, attributes that are particularly relevant to engineering as a discipline. The benefits are often contrasted with the characteristics of lecture-based learning, as in the table below, taken from a 1996 paper¹.

Activities have a strong practical basis and are often “lab-based”, while teaching is primarily through the medium of the “round-table” tutorials organised and led by the students themselves with the help/presence of faculty advisors/mentors. Projects proceed through a number of steps, the most-common expression of which is the so-called “Maastricht Seven Steps” of PBL²:

Clarify and agree working definitions, unclear terms and concepts
Define the problem and agree which phenomena require explanation
Analyse the problems (brainstorm)
Arrange explanations into a tentative solution
Generate and prioritise learning objectives
Research the objectives through private study
Report back, synthesize explanations and apply new information to the original problems

Research on the impact that PBL has on student’s education is on-going, but completed studies point to students who follow a PBL-centred curriculum retain knowledge longer and gain a deeper understanding of a subject than those who learn only through information transfer; they also develop better problem-solving and collaborative skills. We’re hoping that’s what the students who take our summer school module will discover too.

In my next blog post I’ll discuss some of the challenges with PBL – and the solutions we’ve come up with.

References

Lutz and Schachterle “Projects in Undergraduate Engineering Education in America” European Journal of Engineering Education (1996) 21, 207 – 214.
Taken from “An Introduction to Project-Based Learning”, Maggi Savenn-Boden, Coventry University Publications

Academic discovery and personal development: the Pre-University Summer School

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Joana Correia

As we said farewell to the 255 high school students who joined us this summer for the Pre-University Summer School it struck us once again how dramatically the programme has grown since its inception in 2013.

Starting with 50 students in its first year the programme now looks and feels very different, but its core objective remains the same: to offer students a taste of university life in London at one of the world’s best universities, King’s. With a packed timetable of lectures, seminars, group activities and skills based workshops this two week programme allows students to experience the style and demands of undergraduate level study and to build their skills and confidence for the future. Many of them also opt to live in our halls of residence which provides a valuable cultural opportunity, as one student put it, “to understand how people from all around the world think and live”*. It is an intensive and highly rewarding experience and as we begin to plan for our 5^th summer we have been reflecting on the successes of this year’s developments to inform our approach.

Diversifying our offer
Summer 2016 was when we launched a newly designed Pre University Summer School. It had a lower cost to participants than previous programmes that we had offered and had a larger range of academic course options that we’d been able to offer in the past. As a result, we were thrilled to receive 40% more students on to campus and into our learning community.

Medicine, Psychology, Law, Business Management, Politics opened King’s doors to a whole new set of students. The appetite for the health-related courses in particular was huge. Student feedback suggests that in the case of vocational subjects, where study involves a heavy investment of time and energy, the chance to ‘try out’ the subject and find out what it entails is an attractive proposition –“I came in being unsure about my future prospects, I left almost positive that I wanted to pursue psychology”.

Untitled design

Developing the curriculum
We recognised that the students applying to our summer school had strong academic capabilities so we designed the 2016 programme accordingly to be as challenging and immersive as any of King’s rigorous undergraduate level programmes. An extended timetable included afternoon seminars in the daily schedule, allowing students to engage with academic literature and case studies which would feature in degree-level study. All courses also set their students two assignments, designed to mirror the undergraduate assessment patterns of the relevant subject. One class was even asked to submit their written assignment (to critically assess a referendum as a decision making tool for government) via the plagiarism software Turnitin.

Summer learning is a natural extension of King’s faculties’ teaching agenda and so summer students get access to the same active and experiential learning as year-round degree students, with hugely popular visits to laboratories, research facilities and training centres. On the Medicine course, for example, students spent a morning gaining valuable clinical skills experience at the Chantler Simulation and Interactive Learning Centre and this was cited as one of the best aspects of the course in the end of course evaluation. With 96% of students stating the programme helped them develop their academic skills and with a 10% increase to 91% of students agreeing that the overall programme met their expectations we will continue to challenge and extend our students through a dynamic and rigorous academic offer.

Enhancing our pastoral care
At its heart the Pre-University Summer School is also designed to offer an insight into university life: independent living, being a responsible adult and building positive relationships with a new and diverse group of people. As such, and with a 54% increase in the number of residential students this summer, we implemented a change within our pastoral staffing to better support students outside of the classroom. Every year King’s employs current King’s students as student ambassadors to supervise the Pre-University students due to their age (mostly under 18). However, this year we refined the staffing structure and placed a greater emphasis on the role of specialist pastoral ambassadors, who were assigned a discrete group of students within the accommodation for the duration of the programme. These ambassadors were instrumental in enhancing the feeling of a safe and secure environment and we therefore scheduled more time on arrival day for introductions, icebreakers and briefings about the programme which were all conducted within these pastoral groups. This allowed students to get to know their assigned ambassador, and vice versa, but also fostered a sense of community within these small groups. One of our returning students noticed these subtle developments, commenting that it “was amazing to see that by the end of the programme the flats were more like small families”.

Scholarships for refugees at King’s College London

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Joana Correia

Untitled design

This summer King’s College London welcomed six individuals, all with refugee status, to study for three weeks on the Undergraduate Summer School.

Students and staff involved in this partnership with UNHCR were interviewed about their experience, giving readers an insight into how these scholarships aimed to improve the lives of those currently in the UK as refugees.

To read the full article by Omar Karmi, please see the UNHCR website here.

‘Teaching Joyce to an international classroom’

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Joana Correia

Lit in the City

Helen Saunders is a PHD candidate at King’s College London, writing on modernist literature and fashion, who is also a freelance media analyst. Helen co-taught the Literature in the City module with George Legg. The original blog can be found here.

I’ve just finished co-teaching a Summer School at King’s College London. My co-tutor and I split the course, so he took on some more theoretical stuff, along with Yeats and Woolf, while I taught Joyce for a week – a whole week! – as well as Elizabeth Bowen. I also took the final session of the course, in which we talked about Rebecca Solnit’s views on maps and I showed my students the evolution of the Tube map over time.

It was a spectacularly busy three weeks, with afternoon sessions each day running 2-6. It is really hard to teach for four hours a day, and to think of ways to keep students interested, so this was great teacher training. And while I wasn’t a teacher in the sense that I wasn’t in loco parentis (all my students were over 18) my admiration for my schoolteacher friends grew inestimably over the course.

Nonetheless I like to think I managed things well. I knew all their names within a day or two (!) and was touched at the end of the course when several said they’d enjoyed Joyce as one of the favourite writers. We’d done extracts from throughout Joyce’s career – ‘The Dead’, ‘A Little Cloud’, ‘Two Gallants’; ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Lestrygonians’; and finished with some extracts from the Wake, including ALP’s beautiful closing lines (which we compared with ‘Penelope’, too). No Portrait, you’ll have spotted, because it didn’t quite accord with the theme of the course as clearly as the other texts did (I may change this next year, as part on my ongoing project to learn to love Portrait). With this exception, I think the immersion into an author like this, for five solid days, is a great experience. Teaching Joyce to an international classroom was great fun: when tackling the Wake, we established we had 19 languages between us all, and if that’s not a good thing for tackling it, I don’t know what is.

We also went on some terrific trips. I took my students to the British Library and the Museum of London, but my favourite external trip was to the now-closed tube station at Down Street, as part of our Elizabeth Bowen/Blitz lesson. We had a guide from TfL who showed us the amazing station, explaining how it had been converted during the war into the offices of the Railway Executive Committee. Many of the original features and fittings are still there, including signage and even baths and toilets! Though I took some pictures, we were told not to share these on social media. It’s worth booking your own trip, but our guide warned us these cost about £70.

I say ‘external’ trip above because we also spent some time in the KCL archives. Our wonderful college archivists had prepared an assortment of bits, including Virginia Woolf’s Class List (you can just see her, Miss V. Stephen, in the German category) and John Keats’ enrolment register (he’s right at the bottom of the list)! I work a little bit on Woolf and I’d love to come back to these archives post-submission (hopefully in the next six months or so?) to work on these documents more. Her father, Leslie Stephen, also went to King’s for a bit (post-Eton, pre-Cambridge) and I wonder if there’s an article to be written, ‘The Stephens at King’s’ or such:

Museum of London: Digging deeper into London’s history

Posted on August 9, 2016 by Joana Correia

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 7^th 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…

Summer Times

Tag Archives: Summer at Kings