Inspiration from SLIME - part one

I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent conference the week before last, run by Renaissance South East, all about their fantastic Green Slime project (Science Learning in Museum Education - isn't that a wonderfully evocative acronym?). There were some really wonderful projects being run by museums across the South East, and as a Midlander myself it was a refreshing change of scenery to hear about new projects going on a little further afield than my own back yard. The conference was held at Brooklands Museum, which was a rather exciting venue in its own right (at least, all the cars and planes and fire engines and so on appealed to me!) that I hope to return to in the future to have a better nose around than our short lunch break allowed.

It's my intention to talk a little about various exciting and inspirational things that I heard at the conference in more detail in separate posts, but for today I'm going to start with the overwhelming themes of the day.

As you'd expect from Green SLIME, the main overarching themes of the day were sustainability, promoting biodiversity and generally encouraging others to be more aware of the world in which we live. I was very impressed with the variety of ways that the SLIME partner museums had found to engage with the topic; from playground fauna and flora surveys to town planning, the work was a lot more varied than I'd imagined that it was going to be. But really the lessons that I found most compelling came from the ways in which the partner museums had engaged with their target audiences, moreso than the content of the projects themselves.

Words like "consultation" and "ownership" are thrown around a lot these days, and sadly they're often just token efforts to making people feel involved in the things that we do in our museums. Thankfully, I had my confidence restored that it doesn't always have to be that way; I was particularly inspired by a project at Tunbridge Wells Museum in Kent where a school group had been allowed to evaluate the marketing of a museum and actually make a real change to their strategy to make their practice more sustainable. The impact with the children involved was immense, all because they will see their ideas put into practice 'for real', not just as a part of some exercise. As far as showing that you value the opinions of your stakeholders goes, that's a pretty powerful message of trust and respect right there.