Comics At Campbeltown Museum
Campbeltown Museum welcomes engagement from primary and secondary schools, led and facilitated by Heritage Learning and Access Assistant Khara MacPhail. Read below to see how Khara arranges and creates the museum’s outreach programme.
In September 2024, Campbeltown Museum staff collaborated with authors Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers of METAPHROG to design a comic book experience for pupils from two local primary schools. Everyone involved “very much enjoyed” it!
This project lasted a few weeks and had four main phases: preparation and organisation with schools and authors, school visits, a school video workshop, creating the comics, and the outcomes.
The key aims of this project were to:
- To allow young people to visit Campbeltown Museum and explore their local heritage and history.
- Collaborate with the museum team and authors to develop a comic book strip based on an object or painting in the museum collection.
- To break the stereotype that museums are boring places and welcome young people to heritage through the development of fun, interactive activities and community engagement.
We created a project with minimal stress and no cost for the teachers and school staff involved. We sent the schools a brief with all relevant details, aims, and actions, photo/contributor forms, and a PDF of comic book page templates that can be printed for this event and reused for future classroom activities.
The school visits to the museum took place over two afternoons, and all 87 children were able to come along. The children were given time to explore the collection, ask questions, and ultimately choose the object that they wanted to come alive in their comic designs. Some children and staff had never visited the museum, so allowing them to explore our displays was exciting.
The original idea for the workshop with METAPHROG was to hold an in-person session at the museum. However, it was more practical to host this as an online session. This also allowed for all four classes to attend at the same time. Both schools were able to walk to the museum for the visits, and the online session meant that the authors and museum staff did not have to travel- which kept the project's carbon emissions down. After introducing the workshop and authors, I handed over to Jason and Sandra, who gave the children an overview of their work. They then talked to the children about creating characters and ‘worlds’ (stories) and gave some great tips. After a Q&A session, we ended the workshop and left the schools to work on the comics.
The work produced by the primary schools has been turned into a comic and is available at the museum. In addition, each pupil received a Heritage Hero award, designed for history, heritage, and archaeology projects and accessible to everyone regardless of age, ability, or background.
Support by Live Argyll, Argyll and Bute Council, The Gannochy Trust and The Scottish Book Trust
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