Welcome to GEM                                      

GEM is for everyone interested in learning through museums and heritage.

We are based in the UK but have members around the world.

 

 

Learning with Archive Collections

In association with Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

16 February 2012, Birmingham

 

If you come to GEM’s Learning with Archive Collections seminar you will find out about the innovative learning and outreach work taking place using archive collections, and its potential to develop, empower and transform individuals and communities.  

 

At the Learning with Archive Collections seminar you will have the opportunity to network with those working with archive collections in some way.  Many of the ideas and issues under discussion, and approaches to learning, engagement and working practices, are clearly transferrable across the heritage sector and into the voluntary and community sectors.

 

 Learning with Archive Collections aims to place archives learning and outreach on the map, and will provide the opportunity to share ideas, experiences, working practices, whilst setting a context in terms of challenges, and possible solutions and newer models for working.  Also, the seminar provides an opportunity to bring together this community of practice.

 

More information

 

 

GEM Conference 2011

Thinking Ahead & Staying Afloat

6-8 September 2011, Norwich

How can we think more strategically and plan ahead to ensure we more than stay afloat in the current challenging times?

Reports of this year's annual conference have appeared in the latest edition of the Journal of Education which was published at the end of November.  Read John Reeve's impressions of conference here.

 

 

Laying the foundations of heritage education training

John Stevenson, GEM's director, spoke at the ICOM-CECA conference, Zagreb, September 2011 about how GEM has been responding to changes across the heritage sector, and about GEM’s integrated approach to the training of heritage educators. He reflected on heritage education as a profession, and on what we as heritage educators do and how effective we are. He suggested that we needed more research into the effectiveness of the teaching which we do. Download a PDF of the talk (104KB)

 

 

Cultural learning is too valuable to lose
John Reeve, GEM Chair

 

This is not a whinge or special pleading at a time of savage cuts, but a wake-up call about cuts in funding to learning services in museums, galleries and heritage.


These appear to reflect a shift in attitudes to learning and a step back to earlier assumptions about where learning belongs. Not only are learning and outreach posts going, but whole departments and teams. That is even before the full impact of the cuts is felt nationally and locally.
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