Experience gained from our educational work over the last sixteen years has shown there is a need to promote education and awareness of maritime archaeology across all ages and sectors of the community. A key way to deliver this is through activity days and events which involve the whole family – a particular speciality of the HWTMA. However, despite our best efforts the HWTMA staff can not currently cover the whole country! To address this the Maritime Archaeology Access and Learning Workshops were developed which aim to increase capacity to deliver marine heritage related activities through informing and educating event organisers, and thus directly enabling a much wider public audience to be impacted. The workshops are funded by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund through English Heritage.
The experience of the HWTMA has resulted in the creation, implementation and management of a range of displays, activities, outreach and education initiatives designed specifically for maritime archaeology. This has given the HWTMA vast experience of maritime archaeology education and placed us in a unique position to deliver these workshops. Three workshops will be run during the project, to date one workshop has been completed.
The workshop brought together interested educators and heritage professionals involved with the marine environment. Target participants included museum education officers, archaeological organisation education officers, heritage event organisers, dive professionals, marine event organisers and volunteers involved with the delivery of events. In addition to presenting information and showcasing the HWTMA’s suite of educational resources the residential workshop also promoted on-going communication and networking between individuals and organisations encouraging development of ideas and effective planning of events in the future.
The timetable was fully packed and very diverse, covering all the necessary topics to make a maritime archaeology themed event a success. Topics included an introduction to both maritime archaeology and marine aggregates, finding funding, publicity and feedback, risk assessments, event photography and an early morning foreshore session examining how to get the most out of the foreshore as a teaching resource.
Initial feedback from the first course has been very positive. Comments included, ‘Workshop coordinators delivered an excellent experience over the two days. They combined professionalism with a friendly, fun approach. The relaxed atmosphere encouraged involvement and communication between workshop participants’ and ‘I now know that aggregate production is consumer driven and not negative’. The second workshop is now fully booked and initial demand for the third has been very high.
All workshops have now been run (March 2008). We hope to be able to run more of these succesful workshops in the future. For more information, or to put your name down for a future workshops, please contact Alison.