UCL Institute of Education

Senior Teaching Fellow
UCL Institute of Education

Caroline leads modules for the MA: Museums and Galleries in Education including Responsive Museums: Inclusion and Outreach in Practice; Constructing & Interpreting Heritage and Museum Placements. She also contributes to Material & Virtual Cultures, Dissertation and Issues modules. She is a personal tutor, academic tutor and marks student assignments and dissertations.

Find out more about the course

Responsive Museums: Inclusion & Outreach in Practice

Aims of the Module

This module focuses on social justice, inclusion and access in a range of museums and archives, onsite and offsite. The emphasis is on informal learning, outreach and community work; and on other audiences such as communities and lifelong learners, and how to balance this work with core audiences such as schools. It looks at varieties of providers including volunteers; and broadly at diversity.

The focus of the coursework is on how to develop museum and gallery learning projects and programme ideas and how to secure funding for them. It looks at the shifts in museum learning over the past 20 years, and advocates that It’s time for a revolution in learning and engagement

Content of the Module

This module addresses:

  • How the whole museum delivers on learning, interpretation, inclusion, access, outreach and partnership;
  • Museum learning based on the principles of social justice; cultural rights; community agency; and participatory and socially engaged practice
  • Principles that underpin the Museums’ Association Campaign, Museums Change Lives (MCL). MCL promotes the social impact that museums can deliver working with their communities. It explores ways that museums enhance health and wellbeing; create better places to live and work and inspire engagement, debate and reflection
  • Current areas of research/ lines of enquiry addressed in the museum sector include:
    • Decolonisation
    • Biodiversity and climate change
    • Health and wellbeing
    • Poverty
    • Inequality and exclusion
    • Democratisation and co-production
    • Human and cultural rights
    • Activism

Students explore these areas and how they are reflected in current museum practice, including the Museum Association’s new learning and engagement manifesto supported by GEM

The module explores how innovative work with new audiences can co-exist sustainably with traditional audiences, practices and programmes, and how the priorities are to be defined and managed, particularly at a time of economic austerity and political change. Students are asked to draw on international examples as well as local ones.

Takeover Day work created by UCL students

 

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