Education
One of the original aims of the Kingston Local History Project was to make our data available to the to the wider community and to schools.
To give access to the wider community our database has been lodged with the Kingston Museum and Heritage Service at their Local History Room in the North Kingston Centre and will soon be available at the Surrey History Service, Woking.
We are very keen that all local schools are aware of the project as it is very much a community project involving co-operation between the University, the local community and the Royal Borough. Our involvement up to this point has included talking about our study to staff and groups of pupils, and making presentations on our methods and what we have so far uncovered about the people of Kingston.
We hope our involvement may encourage small school-based projects into local history, which will not only provide pupils with an insight into their own locality and an aspect of history which they can relate to, but will also show them how computing techniques can be used in studying the past.
The Kingston Local History project is particularly relevant to primary schools as they generally have a theme concerning the Victorians within their history curriculumThe response from the schools we have already visited has been very positive from both the teachers and the pupils. The pupils have been particularly interested in 'meeting the children of Victorian Kingston' and finding out how Victorian children of similar ages and from nearby streets in the Kingston area, lived their lives.
For the teachers we can supply portions of our data on disk, usually relating to the area of the school. This allows them to incorporate information technology into their history teaching and shows how this technology can help to recreate the past. Crucially, it also allows them to do simple comparative studies using sample data without the long processes involved in database creation.
The project also has potential interest for secondary education as a means of cross curriculum work in IT and data manipulation. Undergraduate and post-graduate students will find the Project an example of a major study using computer databases and it is currently being used as the model for Kingston University's MA in Local History on the Computer Research Techniques Module.
In the longer term we are looking into the development and creation of a teaching resource package which we would hope to make available across the education spectrum from primary through to tertiary education and we are currently in cross-faculty consultations with our School of Education on this matter.
Related links
