The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

Mary Allen Centre and a rather useful cocktail
trolley - the education team has begun to work, in a
programme entitled ‘Art and Wellbeing’, on a one-toone
basis with cancer patients, taking beautifully-made
reproductions to their bedsides and talking about their
chosen paintings at their chosen level. ‘When we tried
to work with a group, it was impossible to hit the right
note,’ admits Sword. ‘We’d have a professor of art
history alongside someone who wasn’t interested and
the only thing they had in common was cancer. When
we do the same work individually, it turns into a
conversation which takes place on all sorts of levels at
once; we take seaside scenes or a Constable, and often
the paintings become an entrée to talking about
childhood memories of Suffolk or the coast. People do
enjoy it, and it breaks the tedium of being ill; one
person said to me “you’ve no idea how boring it is
dying”, and there are many moments of catching your
breath and carrying on.’
Helping people to translate the visual experience into
words - at all levels - has always been central to the
Education Department’s work, and never more clearly
than in two groundbreaking East of England
Museums Hub projects: Wordscapes, which facilitated
the development of creative writing programmes for
pupils of specific ages; and Transformers, which
aimed to teach science through objects that appear
to have nothing to do with science, looking in
particular at how artists use colour and light to
communicate invisible ideas. ‘Until these projects, our
writing work with schools was done on a wing and a
prayer,’ Sword admits. ‘On a good day it worked, on a
bad day it didn’t, and we never quite knew why.’
Working collaboratively as part of the Eastern region
Hub group, and drawing on the expertise of English
teacher James Doran and Philip Stephenson from the
Faculty of Education, Sword and her team underwent
a stretching period of training, working out new
teaching strategies and developing a methodology for
the future. ‘It’s been very exciting,‘ she says, ‘and
everybody could see immediately that we were
working on a different level. The whole process has
taken the staff and shaken our brains and built our
confidence enormously - not through fluff, but
through real internal content and new skills. Now, we
31
Transformers
participants reflect
on experimentation
with mirrors
Education & Public Programmes