Education and Public Engagement
The museum runs a series of educational and public engagement programmes. These include for example a highly praised "How Science Works" hands on workshop for school students demonstrating the use of microfossils in geological research. The museum also played a major role in securing designation of the Jurassic Coast of Devon and Dorset as a UNESCO World Heritage site and has subsequently been a lead partner in the Lyme Regis Fossil Festivals.
In 2005, the museum launched a project to develop notable gallery characters to patrol display cases, including 'facsimiles' of luminaries such as Carl Linnaeus, Mary Anning, Dorothea Bate and William Smith. They tell stories and anecdotes of their lives and discoveries and aim to surprise visitors.
In 2010 a six-part BBC documentary series was filmed at the museum entitled Museum of Life exploring the history and behind the scenes aspects of the museum.
Read more about this topic: Natural History Museum
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, public and/or engagement:
“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)