As a team we always encourage our students to enhance their skills while studying for their History degree with us, and one way we do this is by offering them opportunities to work with some of our external partners. In this post, we demonstrate how this is undertaken in one second year core module, ‘Working with the Past, co-ordinated by Dr Mike Esbester.
As part of their studies during their History degree, our students have worked with a range of local and international institutions, including the Mary Rose Museum, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the D-Day Story archive, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Pompey History Society, and have undertaken a wide variety of interesting projects over the years.
One of our second year core modules, ‘Working with the Past’, is set up to specifically foster this type of collaboration. In the module we demonstrate how the practice of academic history can be transferred and applied to a vast range of practical projects that involve thinking about, working with, or drawing-upon knowledge and understanding of the past (you’ll find blogs on some of these projects elsewhere on this site).
Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery
This year, one group of students have been working with Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery on their new #EndangeredCrafts exhibition. Having taken inspiration from the Heritage Crafts ‘Red List of Endangered Crafts’, the Museum will hold an exhibition that highlights the objects that are held in its collections that represent traditional crafts that are at risk of disappearing. This disappearance, the Museum notes on its website, “is due to the individuals holding the knowledge and skills being unable to make provision to pass them on to the next generation”.
Our students, Chanel, Gemma and Loraya, in collaboration with Museum staff and under the supervision of our Dr Maria Cannon, have held a Twitter takeover (on 11 May 2023), put together a research panel (coming soon!) and recorded a podcast, which is published on the Museum’s website. To hear the podcast, go to the Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery website here.
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