Dean Barwick Primary School – a museum of learning
Pupils at a small Cumbrian primary school with big ambitions have created their own museum in a move to embed creativity into their school’s curriculum.
With just 26 pupils, Dean Barwick Primary School is a small rural primary school based in South Cumbria. When they applied to the Enquiry Schools programme in June 2010, Dean Barwick Primary wanted to develop their vision of becoming a ‘museum’ school. This vision came out of the school’s work during Spring term 2011, in which the whole school visited their local museum each week in order to experience the curriculum outside the classroom in a unique partnership fostered between school staff and education and curatorial staff at Kendal Museum.
Having found through their experiences of teaching and learning at the museum pupils were more fully engaged in their learning and following much praise from parents as to how excited their children were about working in a different learning environment, the school wanted to use their Enquiry project to extend and deepen their experience with Kendal Museum. While the school had an existing and established relationship with the museum, they felt with the support and expertise of creative practitioners they could genuinely link the museum learning more closely to their classroom-based learning.
The school chose to work with two creative practitioners experienced in engaging young people with museum collections from different perspectives: Noah Rose, a visual artist based in Manchester with a background in public art/sculpture and Jamie Barnes, a based locally curator.
Another aim of the enquiry was to create not only a museum learning environment in school but also a virtual environment through developing a website, extending provision where there was little physical space to expand in such a small school. Dean Barwick is very much at the heart of their village it serves and the school saw an opportunity to reach out and engage the whole community.
School co ordinator Linda Graves said: "We want to enrich the curriculum and broaden the children's learning experiences in as many ways as possible, leaving them to become fully creative in their thinking and ability to work with a range of providers. We believe strongly that this leads them on to be enquiring adults".
Note on the illustration photographs: The photographs were part of the focus on the bird collections, in which the cases were used for estimation in numeracy. The children used oil pastels to find as many colours as they could on the plumage of the birds of paradise, talked about extinction and finally the museum focus was used as a stimulus for literacy over two sessions. The children discussed the ethics of the fashion industry of times passed, and the reasons for the birds’ capture, and wrote speech bubbles from the birds' point of view as to how they felt about being captured.
