One of the many wonderful things about working at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford is Friday morning coffee. Organised by the Keeper of Special Collections, Chris Fletcher, this weekly gathering includes a ten-minute ‘show and tell’ from a colleague, visiting academic or graduate student. It’s an exciting opportunity to learn more about some of the amazing items from the collections from an avid enthusiast.
Last week, the Public Engagement team, based at the Weston Library, had the opportunity to both share something of our work and to thank our colleagues for the support they give us in bringing the Library’s exhibitions and collections to life for different audiences.
We shared a selection of items from our Moments in Medicine workshop for secondary schools. This takes students through a thousand years of the development of public health in Britain. We chose this example from the varied range of work we do because it draws items from several areas including Medieval Manuscripts, Rare Books, and the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera.
Here’s the video of me sharing these amazing items and how we use them with colleagues. Please bear in mind that it’s an unedited single take! Thanks to Prof. Henrike Lähnemann for the excellent camerawork and making the video available online and to Dr. Matthew Holford for expert curatorial support.
Moments in Medicine
If you’re a teacher interested in bringing a group to visit the Bodleian, you can find out more on the School visits page of our website.
A selection of schools resources, including a downloadable version of Moments in Medicine topic is available on the Bodleian’s Resources for teachers webpage.
This article is an interview that I did for the Oxford Social Prescribing Research Network about my work at Oxford Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum.
I have a truly amazing role as Wellbeing Outreach Officer that centres on the connection between human health and wellbeing and the health of the natural world of which we are a part. This interview focuses on work with Social Prescribers and their clients. We seek to improve the mental health and wellbeing of these visitors by using the unique features of the Arboretum to help them reconnect with nature.
It’s one job at two incredible venues. The Botanic Garden is opposite Magdalene College, beside the River Cherwell in the heart of Oxford and Harcourt Arboretum lies a few miles outside the city. I have received a very warm welcome from my new colleagues (although the peafowl have regarded me with studied indifference so far) and I feel very privileged to have been given personal tours by Garden Curator Mark Brent and Harcourt Arboretum Curator Ben Jones. The spring bulbs are coming into flower and the trees look magnificently statuesque in the winter sunshine.
Winter sun filters between trees at the Arboretum
I’ll be working there Monday to Wednesday each week, sharing the scientific wonder and importance of plants, nature and green spaces with school groups, families and other audiences. One of the many attractions of the role for me was the focus on the positive role of nature in health and well-being and I look forward to helping develop this area of work.
Hamamelis flowers at Harcourt Arboretum
This new role fits neatly with my other part-time job as Education Officer at the wonderful Bodleian Libraries on Thursdays and Fridays. I’m really pleased that I can continue to share the exhibitions and collections with schools and families visiting the Weston Library.
If you’re in Oxford over the half term week, you might enjoy our events for families. Amazing Adaptations is on at the Garden all week and there are Signs of Spring family walks on Thursday 16 February. I’ll be running Photo Family Fun at the Weston library on that Thursday. Please say ‘hello’ if you see me!
Back in 2020, I wrote the article Supporting Learning about the HOPE project at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. That was a few months into the lottery-funded project which comes to an end this Spring. They say that time flies when you’re having fun and that must explain my disbelief that three years have passed so quickly.
HOPE Learning Officers with the trusty Museum van
I’d been part of the pilot project that had led to the award of the funding for the main project, so I was delighted to be recruited by the museum as a HOPE Learning Officer, alongside my new colleagues Susie Glover and Kate Jaeger. It didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts: we’d been appointed but then the country went into lockdown. Our main focus was schools outreach but we were all stuck at home. That’s why the article above was about supporting learning. We quickly produced resources that parents could use at home and teachers could set on line for their pupils. Our first summer school was entirely online!
We were glad to have been able to help out at a difficult time but what we had really signed up for was sharing the amazing world of insects with kids in schools. In autumn 2020, armed with a daily Covid testing regime, hand sanitiser, masks and visors, we were able to do just that. The response we got from teachers and children was wonderful and in November I wrote this post on Working for Hope (based on a series of tweets I wrote for the Museum’s account) about our aims, what we had done, and some of the questions we’d had from kids. It became clear to us that, after the restrictions of lockdown, they were eager to reconnect with nature.
Even humble nettles can be home to amazing insects.
With the drop in insect numbers that comes with the first frost, our programme shifted to activities that explored insects within the Museum collections and to other aspects of outreach, including digital. We started to build what was to become a very successful community of young entomologists, aged 10-14, through the creation of a weekly blog called ‘Crunchy on the Outside’ alongside school holiday events that allowed us to explore aspects of entomology in more depth than we could in our school discovery days. In this way, kids who we met in schools, at the museum, or who first encountered the project online, could pursue their interest in insects and meet like minded peers (“I’ve found my people”). The online blog provided continuity for this growing community, providing a link in between events.
In Spring 2021 I was ready to get stuck into a full programme of school visits that we had originally planned to start after Easter and running through to October. During the school Summer holiday we would run the in-person ‘Insect Investigators’ summer school. It felt really good to be back on track with the programme that we’d originally intended, but I was unexpectedly derailed from those tracks when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully, I was able to take part in the June and July school visits and the August summer school. We went behind the scenes at the Museum to learn about the main insect orders and their ecological importance, practiced identification in the University Parks, learned about macro photography amidst the flowering borders at Oxford Botanic Garden, and embarked on group science investigations at Harcourt Arboretum (“We’ve calculated there are 36,000 grasshoppers in the meadow!”) before sharing it all with family members and Museum Staff.
A buzz in the air at the Botanic Garden.
It was an excellent way to end the season because a course of chemotherapy in the Autumn meant I had to isolate from most people, especially school kids with their mix of coughs and sniffles.
The response to my situation from the team was wonderful. Our team leader, Sarah Lloyd took care of everything, so that work issues were not a concern, and Kate and Susie stepped into the breach to run ALL the school visits not to mention teacher CPD, after school clubs, and museum events. I focussed on the digital aspects, including the blog, tapping away on my laptop at home, communicating with researchers who were providing posts for the blog, and contributing to meetings remotely.
Hair today, gone tomorrow.
So many others in the wider team at the Museum were supportive and helpful in myriad ways. I must also add my thanks to Neil Stevenson, my line manager for my other role at The Bodleian Libraries, who was similarly helpful in my other role, at the Bodleian Libraries. I know that not everyone receives such a positive response from their workplace following a cancer diagnosis, so I was very relieved to have any work concerns lifted away, so I could focus on treatment.
January 2022 meant the start of radiotherapy. Although I can’t imagine this is a factor for most patients, I was pleased that the course of daily treatments would be completed in March, just before the insects started buzzing again as the weather began to warm up. At last I could get stuck into the outreach programme.
I found that summer truly joyous! Our visits were a mix of new schools and those who had rebooked and our ‘Crunchy’ community of young entomologists was going from strength to strength, with many familiar faces at each gathering and some we had first met in primary classes now at secondary school. It was also good to see how many schools were developing their site for nature and incorporating this into their work with children. The 2022 summer school was, once again, a delightful highlight with a new group of eager young people benefiting from our now-established model.
Drinking in the scent of summer.
All things must pass, however, and Autumn saw Kate return to a full-time teaching role and Susie embark on school-based teacher training. We were able to finish our time with one last ‘Crunchy’ event at the end of August; building pooters from recycled materials then using them to catch insects!
The last school visits of the project Took place during the autumn and I also hosted groups at the Museum. The focus moved to the final evaluation and the legacy of the project. This will include both physical and digital aspects. The resources and activities will continue to be used with children and other audiences who visit the Museum and the lessons learned from successfully engaging 10-14 year olds will be used to continue to support this group. Digital resources will be integrated within the Museum’s existing website and Learning Zone. A Peppered Moth game which Susie developed to teach natural selection will become an exciting online simulation and the insects from the popular ‘To Bee or not to Bee’ ID activity have been digitised for an online version. I have written and scheduled blog posts through February and the plan is to then integrate this into the Museum’s existing online activity.
A parting gift from colleagues, drawn by the talented Katherine Child.
The project culminated on 8 February with the official opening of the Ellen Hope Gallery at the Museum, a new public space for entomology. At the same time I move on to another exciting role (watch this space) into which I will carry all that I have learned, and the many happy memories, from my time with HOPE.
Teachers take delight in inspiring their students. They must prepare them for exams. Sometimes this creates a tension; concentrating too heavily on assessment objectives may jeopardise the sense of wonder in a topic while too little consideration of them risks failing to prepare students for their exams.
In my role as an education officer, I contributed to a recent article ‘Chaucer’s World’ Study Days: Enhancing Learning and Encouraging Wonder, which explores how teachers, university academics, and Public Engagement colleagues have sought to achieve both. As the lead author Professor Marion Turner puts it, ‘to teach and to delight’.
Our collaborative essay, published in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession, reflects on the ‘Chaucer’s World’ study days co-organised for secondary schools by the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, and the University of Oxford. The event is aimed at A Level students and is intended not only to help them with their preparation for the A-Level English Literature exam but also to inspire in them a wider appreciation of Chaucer’s works and medieval literature and culture in general.
In a nod to Chaucer, the article is structured as a collection of ‘tales’. In The Education Officer’s Tale, I describe the structure of the Chaucer’s World study day, explain how we have sought to overcome the challenges schools face in engaging with such events, and reflect on how we adapted to a remote delivery model during the pandemic. Materials we created are available on the Bodleian’s website on the Resources for Teachers pages. Please feel free to use these with your classes.
From the Bodleian’s perspective, the study day has been a huge success, becoming a key part of our annual offer. The combination of access to contemporary texts, exploration of the historical and cultural context of Chaucer’s writing and real engagement with experts in the field has proved to be a popular combination with several schools returning year after year. Elsewhere in the article, Charlotte Richer considers the positive impact on her students in The Teacher’s Tale.
I hope you enjoy reading the article and agree that it provides an example of how we can both enhance learning and encourage a sense of wonder through an extracurricular experience. The Bodleian’s next Chaucer’s World Study days will be in March 2023. If you would like to know more, please email education@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Image: Bodleian Libraries
Turner et al. 2022. ‘Chaucer’s World’ Study Days in Oxford for Post-16 Students: Enhancing Learning and Encouraging Wonder. New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 3.2: 70-78. https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/| ISSN: 2766-1768.
As memories of summer fade into autumn’s golden hues, we see the days shortening and must tackle those dark morning starts. It’s not something our ancestors had to contend with – they rose with the sun – but it’s one of the demands of modern working life.
If, like me, you’re relatively happy with a sunlit early start, but find autumn and winter mornings difficult, here are some tips on coping with dark mornings once the clocks have gone back.
Top tips for dark morning starts
1. Get out during the day, even if it isn’t sunny. Exposure to natural daylight can lift our mood, even on an overcast day.
2. Keep up exercise. It may feel harder when the weather isn’t at its best, but regular exercise is a great way of combatting daytime fatigue. A daytime walk, run or cycle outside will combine exercise and daylight exposure.
3. Think about taking a vitamin D supplement. Our skin synthesises this vitamin when exposed to light so shorter days may mean we are producing less.
4. Connect with nature. Getting outside is also a great way to stay in touch with the natural world. This is great for our wellbeing; noticing the little changes around us helps to remind us that spring is on the way.
5. Stay Hydrated. When we wake up we need to hydrate and this can contribute to feeling fatigued. While a caffeine fix is the first choice for many, try drinking some water first.
6. Prep the night before. Get as many things done each evening so you don’t have to start each morning with an unappealing to-do list. This might include choosing clothes for the next day, making a packed lunch, or packing your work bag.
7. No screens before sleep. If you’re finding it hard to sleep, or you aren’t feeling refreshed on waking, make sure that you aren’t using a screen for the last hour before bed. The light from screens can disrupt the natural rhythm by which our body prepares for sleep each day.
8. Turn off the snooze button. It’s very tempting to think ‘just a few more minutes in bed’ but it may be better to start your day straight away and avoid the risk of oversleeping. Turn the snooze button off and and put your phone or alarm out of reach, so you have to get up to turn it off.
9. Turn the light on. Put the light on as soon as you are awake. This will help your body maintain a sleep-wake rhythm and avoid daytime fatigue.
10. Try listening to some epic music on your way to work. Something like the film theme fromThe Lord of the Ringswill make even a familiar walk or the most humdrum commute feel like an momentous quest!
I wrote this post for the ‘Crunchy on the outside’ blog from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It’s a Zooniverse citizen science project that might be of interest to anyone running a school science club from KS2 upwards.
Measure beautiful bees from around the world to help biologists understand why bee species are declining. The Big Bee Bonanza is a new citizen …
With A Level results day pending, press, politicians and performative celebrities alike will be preparing for the inevitable annual media scrum.
Navigate your way though the quagmire of commentary with this handy results day buzzword bingo card. I hope it helps a little to make the day more manageable!
All about ants! I wrote this for the Crunchy on the outside blog in response to a question we received that really made us think about ants and what ‘success’ means in terms of a species.
Noah contacted us recently with an intriguing question: ‘What is the most successful species of ant?’. It really got us thinking! Insects are a very …
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