The plan was this: invite twelve young people into the museum, fill their brains with information about the Polar Regions and museum displays and then ask them to produce the framework for a temporary exhibition about climate change. In a week.
There is a lot of buzz around ‘co-curation’ projects at the moment. The idea is, by bringing in an outside group of people to work alongside curators and other museum professionals, both sides gain new expertise and the resulting exhibition represents voices which might not otherwise be heard in the museum. It’s an effective way for both the staff and the public to learn more about collections, and it welcomes people who might not usually feel at home in museums. In this case, that underrepresented group was teenagers.

By delivering our co-curation project as part of a week-long residential summer school for 16-17 year olds just about to apply for university, we hoped that we could also show our team what life is like as a student at the University of Cambridge. Living and working in Selwyn College, they were able to spend their evenings in the college social spaces, eating in the dining hall, sleeping in student rooms (and even playing sardines in the college gardens). Dr. Matt Wise, Schools Liaison Officer at Selwyn and former PhD student at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), took a leading role in the running of the course and ensured that student ambassadors were on hand all week to help settle the students into college life. All in all, we wanted to put our team in the best possible position to apply to study at Cambridge when applications open at the beginning of October – providing them with knowledge of the academic courses available and what they would entail, as well as an idea of the social lives of Cambridge students.

We had a staggering number of applicants for what was a very small summer school. Students submitted written applications and those who were shortlisted had skype interviews where we asked them difficult questions like, “Tell us about an object or image that you feel represents your personality” and “Can you talk to us about an exhibition or performance that has had an impact on you, whether positive or negative?” Eventually, we managed to narrow down applications from 130 at the start of the process, to just 12. This final group had representatives from all over the UK, from Birmingham to small Devonshire towns and London to the North East. We had 11 students from state schools and one from an independent school and they represented a whole host of different interests and perspectives on the climate crisis. There were geographers, an aspiring journalist and an economist, to name just a few. What they all had in common, though, was a thirst for knowledge and a dedication to reporting climate science and research to the public.

With the plan for the project all worked out and the team chosen, it wasn’t long before they began to arrive for the start of what was always destined to be a very busy week. From the very first moments of bringing them together, we knew something special was happening – strangers talked like old friends and the excitement to get started was palpable. Fortunately, we had lots to be getting on with…

Be sure to read the next in our series of blogs about our Climate Co-Curation Project to find out what our group did over their week in SPRI.

Tags: ClimateCocuration

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