Thackray Medical Museum
It was a great opportunity to be involved in the development of the museum from its initial planning stages. I was brought in because I’d written the main textbook on Medicine through Time for GCSE History students and the museum developers wanted to ensure that the galleries hit the needs of teachers and students spot-on.
If schools don’t keep returning year after year then one major income-stream for a museum will tail off rapidly.
Aims and Objectives
My task was three-fold:
1. Advise on the content that should be covered to create an effective educational visit for secondary schools and then what could be covered in the space available
2. Advise on what kinds of activities schools would wish to undertake, how e.g. GCSE visits might differ from those of other age-groups and how these issues would affect the kinds of presentation in the galleries
3. Write the GCSE resource pack, creating worksheets, teachers’ notes and ensure that the design was appropriate for printing and copying, then act as guide for groups of teachers undertaking introductory visits prior to the museum opening
Advise on Content
What would schools hope to see in the galleries?
In the first place the major issue was helping the developers decide on the range of content the museum could focus on. For example, GCSE students study the history of medicine from the Egyptians onwards but, in the space available and given the range of artefacts available, coverage of this massive extent of history would have been too cursory. So, rather than have a brief exhibition on earlier periods that would be too brief to help schools, it was decided to focus on the period from the 18th century onwards, linking closely to the development of Leeds and therefore fitting the existing collections effectively. My role was to take away the designers’ anxiety that they needed to cover everything – better a limited but effective coverage than one that’s more extensive but too shallow for the purpose.
Advise on Activities for Schools
How would schools hope to use the galleries?
As the major audience is GCSE teachers then they should be treated as experts, people who know the topic and should be in charge of a visit. They have specific needs of a visit, geared to exam specifications and shouldn’t be handing over responsibility for the day to museum staff. A visit needs to be integrated carefully within the GCSE course. Therefore we could expect teachers to stay in charge of students during the visit but students would need a variety of experiences. On some topics they could learn from the recreated street, on others they needed more formal displays to acquire or reinforce their knowledge and understanding.
Write the GCSE Resource Pack
Once the outline of the displays was established and the text of displays written (but before anything was in the museum) the GCSE pack was created.
It had to offer a variety of activities, some for schools visiting the museum as an introduction, other for those using it as revision.
There also had to be a variety of styles of activity:
- some asking students to collect evidence e.g. of public health conditions in the street (in role as Robert Baker’s researchers)
- others more obviously collecting information about major developments in medical history from the display boards
- others asking students to be inventive, e.g. answering interview questions as if they were Lister
A variety of recording methods were also needed e.g. annotating timelines or line- drawings of scenes in the reconstructed street. All but the most obvious answers also needed to be collected to help teachers travelling from distance who wouldn’t have the chance to make a lengthy preparation visit.
Once drafted, the worksheets then had to be designed so that we knew that answers would fit the spaces and tasks would fit into the designated space.
All this was designed to help teachers and persuade them that a visit to the museum should become an integral part of their course. While it was assumed that many teachers would, in time, develop their own variants on the worksheet activities, this first set of materials would ensure the first visit would be a success. And so it’s proved with the resource pack still in use after 10 years!
Looking Back
Since opening in 1997 the museum has been the UK’s Museum of the Year, England’s Visitor Attraction of the Year, shortlisted for European Museum of the Year and (most importantly in my eyes) received the Sandford Award for Heritage Education on two occasions.
