Inspire

Led by associate professor Kate Allen, working with Faustina Hwang and Nic Hollinworth from the University of Reading, and Andy Minnion, director of RIX Research & Media. The project proved so successful that it now has further AHRC funding to work with RIX Research & Media and The Tower Project’s Job Enterprise and Training Service, an inclusive employment agency, to co-develop STARS (Sensory, Technology & Art Resource Specialists), providing sustainable employment opportunities for people with learning disabilities to work in museums.

During its initial three years, Sensory Objects held more than 60 sensory art and technology workshops at the National Trust’s Speke Hall in Liverpool, the MERL, and the British Museum. Key to the project was engaging people with learning disabilities as co-researchers. In multisensory art and electronics workshops, co-researchers explored how the senses are used when experiencing museum and heritage sites, and then created multisensory interactive artworks that respond to equivalent objects at these sites.

Sensory Objects has helped create new working practices for people with learning disabilities, made public heritage sites more inclusive and enhanced public awareness of learning disability. Allen is also using Sensory Objects research to contribute to Sensory Palaces at Hampton Court London, a health and wellbeing programme for people living with dementia.

Working with theatre company Filskit Theatre, on the Bright Sparks project, Dallas is helping to dispel myths about brain function, and giving children, teachers and scientists a vital insight into neuroscience.

Bright Sparks is a high-quality, interactive theatre roadshow using light and electricity to represent how our brains work. Aimed at children aged 3–7 years and their families, the show – which premiered at the Polka Theatre’s Brain Waves and has toured to positive reviews around the UK – is set inside the human brain. It illustrates the fallacy of the ‘left and right brain’ divide, showing that simultaneous, harmonious function is required to operate this extraordinary biological apparatus.

Dallas also helped develop a laboratory element to the show for use by teachers and, through his blog, has shared his experience and knowledge with the scientific community. He is committed to develop these and other partnerships through his work with the STEM network, pub-based national science festival Pint of Science, and leading Alzheimer’s charities.

Set up by Gemma Watson and Emma Durham from the Department of Archaeology, and Charlotte Williams, of the Classics department’s Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, the club engages children and young people with archaeology and classics. Its membership consists of children ranging from eight to 15, who meet to learn about everything from ancient music and life in medieval Britain, to making prehistoric pottery, designing Roman mosaics and flint-knapping. Children with learning disabilities are among those who regularly attend Reading YAC, which is based at the Ure Museum and run by members of the museum staff, as well as staff and volunteers from the Archaeology and Classics departments. Meetings are each shaped around a different staff or postgraduate students’ research project, and feedback from parents has been universally positive, not least after children attended the Archaeology department’s research excavations. For many, this was their first experience of an archaeological dig, an experience that shows them the skills needed and which, in turn, may one day help create the next generation of archaeologists.