Research

Research 2006 and beyond

Live interpretation and museum theatre are developing areas of interpretation at museums and historic and other sites worldwide. For the past few years Verity Walker has been a member of a University of Manchester-led research team (initially funded by GEM, latterly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board) which has been conducting one of very few in-depth studies into the effectiveness of live interpretation and museum theatre. Phase Three of this research is now underway, authorised by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which is funding a further three years of work.

This new study, entitled Performance, Learning and Heritage, is broadening the focus away from schools to look at the impact of theatre techniques on family audiences. One exciting output will be a specially commissioned piece of theatre (by andrew ashmore and associates) performed at Manchester Museum.

For further details please see the Performance, Learning and Heritage website at www.manchester.ac.uk/plh. There are regular public seminars so why not click and find out more?

Research 2000 - 2005

Verity led an early pilot project based at the Tower of London which worked closely with live interpretation company Past Pleasures and the Hermitage School in Tower Hamlets, and Tony Jackson at Manchester University and his team of Helen Rees Leahy, Paul Johnson and Verity built on this with Phase Two, which combined four contrasting schools with two very different museums, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Pump House People’s History Museum in Manchester. One Key Stage Two class from each school experienced live interpretation, one had an equivalent, high-quality experience usually based around artifact handling, an AV presentation or a guided tour. Both experiences had the same learning objectives.

The children’s responses (written, oral and artistic) were measured against a fixed set of criteria:

• Ownership: how did the experience encourage the child to relate to people/events of the period in question? Did the child show any evidence of emotional or imaginative empathy with the people of the time?
• Connection: did the child manage to connect and understand different elements of the museum experience and different events from the period?
• Recall: did the child recollect key facts completely or incompletely?
• Understanding: did the child digest and process the information fully? did the child demonstrate a grasp of what happened in the past?
• Inspiration: did the child show any evidence of their inspiration being fired or curiosity triggered?
• Surprise: did the child express surprise over any aspect of the experience?
• Experience: what was the child’s overall impression of the museum: the visit as a whole and its component parts, etc?

To read the full report of Phase One as a Word document, click here.

A summary of Phase Two research can be read here - 130K Word doc.

Evaluating theatre and live interpretation - where to start?

Interpretaction is regularly asked for advice on evaluation, especially of theatre projects. Click here for a sample evaluation form (as used with audiences attending the National Trust’s History Team performances in North West Region, or those at national performances of the play Mud, Mulch and Marigolds). Feel free to adapt this for your own use, but remember, evaluation is best carried out by someone outwith your own organisation. If you can, use a professional, and if you can’t consider forming an evaluation partnership with a neighbouring site.

Interpretaction can advise on setting up this kind of link (click here 170k Word doc.)