Category Archives: education

Taking Shelley’s Ghost into the classroom

Alison Prince, Bodleian Libraries Web Manager

Although the Shelley’s Ghost exhibition website was primarily targeted at interested adults, we recognised early on that the material we were showing had some links to the National Curriculum and could also work for a range of curriculum enrichment activities. We started to think about how we could demonstrate the possible uses of the website in the classroom and, in this way, extend access to the materials and the outreach impact of this project even further.

We met with a few colleagues from different departments around the University in order to assess our options. Given the tight timescale we were working to and the fact that the website was primarily aimed at an older audience, we decided that the best course of action would be to create “suggested activity” sheets for teachers to demonstrate how the material might be introduced to their students, and also show the syllabus links.

We were very lucky to make contact with Cressida Ryan, the Classics Outreach Officer for the University of Oxford. Cressida had valuable experience of working with young people and an understanding of how to demonstrate the value and relevance of an idea or activity to schools. If that wasn’t enough, she also had a whole heap of knowledge on the themes and the people showcased in our exhibition.

In what seemed like an impossibly short time, we had a pack of sheets put together based on individual objects in the exhibition or more general themes. My personal favourites include “It’s all Greek to Shelley!”, “A Vindication of the Vindication” and “Editing Frankenstein“. I’m actually tempted to have a go myself…