Last week was the ASOR (American School of Oriental Research) annual meeting in San Diego. The Goulburn Valley project was presented as part of the session Archaeology as a Tool for Enhancing Participant Welfare, Social Cohesion, and Education. Besides our paper “Using archaeological methods to bridge the urban-rural educational divide”, the session included some amazing work by Israeli and American archaeologists working on various outreach … Continue reading Archaeology as a Tool

From the 5th to the 7th of November the University of Liège in Belgium hosted a conference to address the needs of university museums and particularly their unique relationship with their audiences. The conference team highlights its motivation for this conference on the website: “University museums are still mainly visited by an insufficiently diverse audience limited to researchers/students/professors and a few families or informed amateurs. … Continue reading University Museums and their Publics

Our Year 7 students are always very excited when given the opportunity to handle authentic pot sherds so with gloves on and magnifying glasses in hand they approach the activity with tremendous enthusiasm. There is an opportunity to record details of the sherd on an object card or to draw the sherd in its current condition and provide an interpretation of what it may have … Continue reading Pot Sherd Creativity

Sharyn and Annelies are recently returned from visits to all of our partner schools. This year we shared a new range of objects for our classification system activity and we were delighted with the creativity shown in sorting bags of lids, shells and buttons. The classification activity provides an insight into the information that can be gleaned from looking at everyday items in a new … Continue reading 2019 School Visits

In November, the Goulburn Valley project will be attending three international conferences! We will be sharing some of our aims, tools and outcomes in forums focusing on inclusivity in museums and research. From the 5th to the 7th of November Annelies will be attending the conference University museums and their Publics at the University of Liège and presenting the paper “Overcoming Entry Barriers: A Mobile … Continue reading November is Conference Season

Earlier this year the project founder, Sharyn Volk, presented the Goulburn Valley project at the CAUMAC conference on Object-Based Learning and Teaching, Research and Engagement in University Collections. Her presentation included a summary of the project’s progress to date as well as some exciting new collaborations and initiatives that we have coming up. While we can’t disclose everything, we can now talk about the plans … Continue reading Meet Bessie

Now that 2019 is underway Sharyn and I thought it would be nice to look back on the 2018 Melbourne visits. Not only did we have more year groups than ever participating in the visit (years 7 through 9), but we also introduced some new activities! The older students were treated to a tour of a nearby archaeological site, led by the fantastic Adam Ford. … Continue reading 2018 Melbourne Visit Recap