Our 'Sharing Knowledge - Creating Impact' project will bring together the combined skills, knowledge and expertise of 4 cross-European partners - all operating within the museum sector, and offering high-quality educational experiences to their individual audiences; organisations that face similar challenges, yet operate mostly within a vacuum of their own localities, countries and frameworks. Project partners are the the University of Stavanger (Norway), Museum Vestsjaelland (Denmark), Dublinia (Ireland) and York Archaeological Trust (UK). Each organisation is highly regarded in their own country, bringing cultural experiences to huge audiences including schools, families, and experts, through their museums, events, and on-line activity. This project aims to bring together individuals from these organisations to share their experiences, develop working networks, and shape a new co-European way of delivering innovative, distinct and excellent learning activity that widens audiences, develops skills, diversifies engagement and leads to increased sustainability across the cultural museum sector. The project will specifically invite participants from each organisation to experience how each partner delivers their unique learning offer, working face-to-face with their museum visitors alongside the partner staff teams and volunteers, and receiving mentoring support from experienced managers and leaders in their field. Shared experienced through inter-museum exchange (job-swap) and workshops will provide unique training and knowledge sharing opportunities for all those involved in the project. In addition, by starting to build a working network of educational providers in museums that share common values and ambition, the project will begin to make an impact on how and when people from the very young, through to adults, those who face barriers to participate because of disabilities or who are isolated geographically or socially, want to engage with our individual, but common, European cultural offer. This could be through formal education in schools, colleges or universities or informally within museum galleries with interactive learning hosts, or in outside spaces that have cultural resonance or digitally, where information and engagement is directed into peoples homes through new on-line activity. We want to start to embed this outward looking ethos, which we hope to generate, in the wider international museums sector, building common networks and developing ideas together to influence the organisations that look after our fantastic cultural assets . Sharing our results through our established national and international networks and Cultural Routes, within which all the partners in this project play a part, we want our project to become a model for creating a wider European network to communicate ideas about how to embed innovative learning in our cultural offer that reaches out to a much wider audiences than we have at present between us, and encourages everyone to get involved.
By implementing the ‘Sharing Knowledge – Creating Impact’ project our intentions were to build common networks, share experience and develop ideas by bringing together the combined skills, knowledge and expertise within each of our organisations. Within the museum sector all of us are offering high-quality educational experiences to our visitors, but there a quite a few possibilities for our staff to formally develop their competence except through work practice. By bringing our staff together, we intended to share experiences and develop strong, active and working networks, where sharing perspectives and experience could facilitate for further growth of the interpersonal skills of our dedicated staff. Giving our staff the exchange opportunity; where learning of different partners approaches and challenges in their work is knowledge in itself. The achievement for each partner would then be; added resources from the partner organisations; development of skills and knowledge; diversified engagement; a widened audience and increased sustainability. It was the intention to provide unique training and knowledge and to share opportunities for all those involved in the project through the planned staff exchange and workshop activities.
We applied due to a genuine desire to establish networks, share knowledge and develop expertise that would exceed the limitations of each project partner. From previous positive experiences of cooperation between the partner organisations we were sure of a certain potential. Each partner disseminates cultural heritage through visitor centres and have similar audiences ranging from small children to senior citizen, visiting from all parts of the world. Working in the sector there is a realization of continuous potential for improvement on the one hand and restrictions in work capacity on the other; reminding us of the benefit of working together beyond the scope of our own organisation. With the overarching goal of exchanging good practices the idea was to bring together staff engaged in the education and dissemination so that they could work together, share knowledge and establish networks related to visitor experience, delivery of high quality learning, activities for school visitors of all ages and the inclusion of visitors with disabilities and other barriers that restrict engagement. A sustainable network would contribute to consolidate and reinforce each of the partnerorganisations as well as motivate and encourage our staff.