Dr Julia Horn is Acting Head of the Educational Development Group at the Oxford Learning Institute, which exists to support excellence in learning, teaching and research at the University of Oxford

“For me, Agile Objects is a rich opportunity for early career academics to engage with a range of ways in which objects and museum collections could inspire their students. Early career academics are often intrinsically motivated to explore a range of ways to teach, and are keen to engage in courses which could support them with this.

It’s key for me that a course such as Agile Objects should combine two things: 1) an improved understanding of how to access museum objects and 2) a range of pedagogies for thinking about the way objects might lead to enquiry, exploration, discovery, enthusiasm, and/or interdisciplinary learning. It isn’t actually that easy to go beyond using objects to ‘illustrate’ a course, or as a form of one-off visit for enjoyment, and this is the challenge for museum staff and early career academics to collaborate on together.

This is the path that Agile Objects has started to explore, and which opens up a range of ways in which educational developers and museum staff might work together in future.”