An Eco Lens on Place

We’re excited to be working with the South Downs National Park on our Wild World programme with three strands, engaging museums & heritage staff, teachers and young people.

For museums & heritage staff we’re offering two creative training sessions, exploring how we might put an Eco Lens on Place. We regularly run training sessions putting an Eco Lens on Collections, but this one has an added dimension of thinking about places in terms of how people have interacted with nature over history, and how the Earth crisis will affect our relationship to place in future. After the session, we will make a toolkit available with activity ideas to engage visitors and develop eco-centric and climate-conscious interpretation.

The first session is the most exciting as it’s at one of my favourite museums – the Weald and Downland Museum near Chichester. This is an open air museum of rural life and architecture, which I haven’t visited since doing a museum education training course with Sussex Past back in 1990!

This will be a day-long workshop on Tuesday 16th April which will inspire and equip you to engage your audiences with environmental topics in imaginative and participatory ways.

Through active exploration of the landscape, buildings and objects, you will see these with different “ecocentric” lenses – seeing deeper into the past or future, from an animal’s perspective or seeing the patterns of biological life. We will play with tactics such as writing connected “eco-labels”, walking in role as characters, and imagining ourselves as ancestors of future inhabitants of the landscape. 

Together, we will explore ideas about how human cultures have interacted with places and materials, and how learning from the past can inspire action for a liveable future. By the end, we hope you would have plans to apply some ideas developed in the workshop at your museum, gallery or heritage site, to help your audiences see with eco lenses, and to be empowered to act for the planet. We will focus on audiences who prefer informal, accessible and creative approaches such as families, young people and community groups, who might be inspired by nature but find environmental topics challenging too, or who might be new to environmental issues.

It will be facilitated by myself (Bridget McKenzie), my colleague Kevin Campbell Davidson, and with a remote contribution from Justine Boussard.

This in-person event will be supplemented by a shorter session online on 24th April, more accessible to museums & heritage staff from outside the South Downs area. You can book for this here.