The inclusion of people with social disadvantages, e.g. senior citizens, immigrants, ethnic and cultural minorities, or people with lower levels of education, is a hotly debated topic, in society as well as politics. Education is a key issue of inclusion, since it is one of the most relevant factors of successful integration. Museums and Science Centres are pioneers in lifelong learning, and as such - next to schools - highly relevant places for inclusive education. Explainers/Facilitators in Museums and Science Centres play a key role in connecting the topics of exhibitions with visitors, i.e. they are on the edge of communicating to inclusive visitors. The objective of the ITEMS project is to develop, test and promote a training programme for explainers in museums and science centres that enables them identify the needs of some of these groups and to properly address them in their daily educational work. The challenge for explainers is that the range of needs is vast, as are the possibilities to react to these and thus support the visitor. The project aims to develop strategies to open the content and activities for these groups with special needs, including the use of digital media to facilitate better communication and interaction. A modular design of the programmes will enable the partners to integrate the training into the established structures in use at the different locations. For the development of the training module, a number of different strategies will be applied. It will build on best practices already available at the partners, supported by research on the abilities and needs of the respective target groups. In the whole process professionals, such as researchers or specially trained psychologists, will be included. The evaluation will help identify and correct for weaknesses in the programme, thus significantly improving the final product. By gaining active insights and using lots of practical examples during the training, explainers will not only get hands-on solutions to start with, but also the theoretical background to further develop measures and themselves in the future. Last, but not least, for the framework of the training programme the ITEMS project will build on the tried-and-tested professional development programme for explainers originating from the EU project PILOTS. During the project, the participants of the programme - explainers - will significantly enlarge their competences to work with people with special needs visiting a museum or science centre. The over 60 participants at the partner institutions will be from various backgrounds, a gender balance is aimed at. Through the dissemination training more than 100 multipliers ("explainer trainers") from all over Europe will be directly reached. To make the results available to an even larger community, the training module as well as a guidebook collecting strategies and best practice examples will be published online. This enables further museums and Science Centres to take up and improve their own programmes. Further, contributions to conferences, newsletters as well as journals will further spread the material throughout Europe. Overall, the education of the explainers will enable inclusive activities for disadvantaged people, such as senior citizens or immigrants/refugees, to be consistently run at museums and science centres. For the participating organisations as well as those museums / science centres reached through the dissemination activities, the ITEMS project will not only enable a systematic approach to improving their offers to special visitor groups, but also lead to a more inclusive and open museum / science centre environment in general.
In the project, our goal was to design a compelling set of training workshops for explainers and other museum staff. These were to be non-specific to museums, addressing topics of inclusion, participation, and engagement on a more general, personal level without omitting practical techniques and methods of engagement. To this end, we planned to cooperate with various stakeholders such as migrant representatives, or people working with or researching the topic of seniors or old age. The partnership between the museums was expected to foster the exchange of expertise and experience, possibly even down to the level of adopting (and adapting) each other's best practice programmes. We also wanted to offer our staff the opportunity to go on exchanges throughout Europe to broaden their professional horizons and allowing them to be inspired by other museums' operations, activities and communication formats. Through this approach we hoped to significantly increase both their job motivation and their overall creativity, which proved to be the case. The exchanges - although heavily restricted by the pandemic - were very well received by the explainers (who usually do not travel in their jobs at all).
All participating museums wanted to strengthen their engagement with minority and unrepresented visitor groups, focusing mainly seniors and people with migration backgrounds. As both groups are an increasingly important part of society due to strong migration flows and the increasing population age, we, as museum institutions, decided to unite our efforts and learn from each other. Our explainers (museum floor staff) expressed the wish to learn more about group engagement and interactivity to raise their communication skills to the next level, whilst dissociating themselves from outdated methods or prevalent stereotypes. The international exchange component also helped to strengthen the professional network and broaden the horizon of the participating staff, adding a strong practical experience to the more theoretical workshops and training.