The impacts of a CPD programme at Imperial War Museum
The impacts of a CPD programme at Imperial War Museum
By
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
The study reviews the InSite educator immersive learning CPD programme, part of Their Past Your Future (TPYF). The programme involved participants from schools, museums, curriculum development and educator training. The report explores why the combination of elements of the programme produces the impact that it does to explore the learning techniques employed and to consider the implications of this type of education work for future learning and interpretation at Imperial War Museum (IWM).
As an immersive and experiential learning programme, InSite follows a classic model which leads the learner from concrete experience, through reflection and conceptualisation to taking fresh action. Both TPYF programmes - the young people’s immersive learning programme and InSite - have illustrated however that reflection, rather than being a stage in the process, is actually the hub. It is critical at each stage of the process and needs to be facilitated through allocation of time, space and facilitated debate. The InSite programme is effective as an experiential learning programme because it embraces the relatively recent shift in psychological and educational thinking, from learning as an individual endeavour to learning as a social and distributed endeavour, by bringing together a range of practitioner perspectives in an immersive learning experience and effectively scaffolds this learning with input from IWM. Key to the success of the programme is that the learning process is positioned and delivered as personal, social, egalitarian, challenging, non-didactic, self- directed and empirical.
