Teacher Notes

Through their collections and exhibits, museums provide a window on the past where teachers and students can access primary sources of information from major events in our history.

Where do these collections come from and who decides what stories are told?  

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the whole community and is clearly an event that should be documented for future generations.

Which stories should be documented and whose stories should be told? 

The curators at Museums Victoria are currently researching and gathering stories for our collection.  Collecting the Curve is a rapid response collecting project which will ensure that Victorian experiences of the pandemic are preserved for future generations in your state collection. The experiences of children and young people are vital to our collection, hence our Museum of Staying Home project.

The Museum of Staying Home project seeks to demystify museum practices and invites teachers and students to be part of the process of documenting and collecting the historical documents of the future. 

The education team has put together a series of activities that model museum practices. Many of the resources available on this site can be found elsewhere on the Museums Victoria website and provide an overview of how museums capture history as it happens. 

We hope you will find the resources on the Museum of Staying Home site useful.  These notes provide an overview of what is to come so that you can plan for the weeks ahead.

Over the next three weeks we will provide resources to support the exhibition development process under the three broad headings of Museum practice: Research, Collections and Exhibitions, with five activities to choose from each week.  

Week 1: Research  

• What stories do we want to tell?  

Week 2: Collect  

• What objects do we need to tell this story?  

Week 3: Exhibit  

• How do museums create exhibitions?  
• How do we create an exhibition to tell the story we consider to be important? 

Each activity is prefaced with expert videos and examples from the museum collection. Students can learn from museum experts and then think about how they might apply that learning to their own situation. They will be able to pose questions to curators in the first week, collection managers in the second week and exhibition developers in the third week and hear their responses on the Friday of that week. This follows the same format as used in our other Museum at Home Learning activities during term 2.

There are a lot of resources for you to choose from and we imagine that you will want to cut and paste or mix and match activities/resources to meet the needs of your students.  We recommend that you look at all the different options offered and adapt them accordingly.  

We also anticipate that some teachers may want to use these resources in term 3 or 4 or even next year. We will continue to maintain the site and add new resources as they are created.  If you miss our Q and A sessions over the next three weeks, there will be a process for you to ask questions via our Ask Us channel, and they will make sure your questions get through to the right person. We intend to run online sessions for MoSH with our experts in term three so keep in touch with Museum at Home Learning and MVteachers.

We hope this project offers opportunities for you and your students to reflect and consider your place in this historic moment in time, and that you will share those insights with us.   

Make sure you also check in with the Collecting the Curve project to learn more about the collection process as it unfolds. 

Putting together an exhibition: Teacher as Exhibition Project Manager  

Exhibitions require a great deal of planning, co-ordination and teamwork. If you follow our Facebook page during the MoSH weeks you will hear from our exhibition team about what they find challenging in the process of developing exhibitions. The following quote from Emily Siddons seems to sum it up best: 

‘Making exhibitions is a curious gathering of diverse minds and a gradual process of dismantling and rebuilding. We throw out pre-conceptions and try ideas, then dismantle and re-build them, then test those ideas on audiences and rebuild them again. In leading the development of an exhibition, the willingness to be uncertain and to be an empty vessel for teams to feed in their research, knowledge and crazy ideas, and then to see potential in those ideas and iterate them as a team, is the key to making great experiences.’  Emily Siddons, Exhibition Project Manager 

The activities we outline in week three suggest that individual exhibits are created to go into a Museum of Staying Home exhibition. As we explain in the week three activities, an exhibit covers one theme of a bigger story. In this case the bigger story is documenting life under lockdown. By week three your students will no doubt have decided on the story they want to tell e.g. Learning at home, catching up with friends, family life, cooking and eating, artworks, craftworks, exercise or their own unique experience. They may change their minds as they do the activities provided and look at the examples presented in week 3. We have created a series of protypes that might help them to imagine the look and feel of what they might produce. As Emily suggests everyone should be prepared to throw out preconceptions and try something new if the original idea didn’t work. Making exhibitions is an iterative process so be prepared for a non-linear journey. We want your students to experience the iterative process of developing exhibitions as they will develop many important skills.

So what do you think is possible?

• Individual exhibits to load onto MV’s Museum of Staying Home gallery?
• A single class exhibition? 
• A whole year level exhibition? 
• A whole school exhibition?

However big or small your project, we welcome images and stories from the exhibits your students create. 

Here are some things to consider and reconsider as you embark on this project:

Who is involved? 

• Is this a whole class, whole year level or multi-year level project? 
• Who are the teachers you want to include in the plan? 
• Do you want to involve parents? 
• Do you want to involve the community eg hire community hall, vacant shop or other building? 

What resources do you need? 

• Are you able to access the museum’s resources and videos? 
• Will you draw on the resources of other museums, galleries or libraries? 
• Are there adequate resources in your school for students to embark on this project? 
• Are there enough computers, cameras, materials? 
• Is there anyone who can help get more resources together? 

How will you work with students? 

• Will you brainstorm the project with students and get them to imagine what is possible? 
• How will you shape their thinking? 
• Will they be working individually, in pairs or in teams? Or a mixture of all? 
• How much time will you allocate to the task? 
• Will you let them choose what their input will be or offer a range of options to chose from? 

Where will they produce their exhibits? 

• Is this a task for doing at home? 
• Can some of it be done at school? 
• Should all of it be done at school? 

When, where and how will you launch the final product? 

• Having an idea of how big or small or private or public you want the event to be will influence your planning. 

The education team at Museum Victoria is happy to provide further assistance should you require.  We can visit in person, conduct a zoom session or answer your questions via email or phone.  Let us know how we can help. What email and phone number should you be contacted on.