The Peace Museum » News

The Peace Museum gains national quality standard

peacemuseum — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:26:36 +0000

We are very proud to announce that The Peace Museum has been awarded full status as an Accredited Museum by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).

The MLA’s Museum Accreditation Scheme sets nationally agreed standards for all museums in the UK. The Peace Museum’s award proves that it measures up, meeting the guidelines on how it is run, how it looks after its collections and the services it provides its visitors.

Clive Barrett, Chair of the Board of The Peace Museum, commented: “This award is the result of years of hard work and is a sign of how much the museum has progressed since its beginnings in 1994. It is a great achievement and an honour to receive.” Andrew Motion, Chair of MLA, said: “Being awarded Accreditation is an impressive achievement. It recognises the high standard and service that The Peace Museum provides and acknowledges the hard work of its volunteers and staff.”

The Peace Museum’s Accreditation award was presented to Clive Barrett on behalf of the museum by Jayne Tyler, Regional Manager, Yorkshire and the Humber, MLA, at the start of the 2010 Leeds International Olof Palme Memorial Peace Lecture at Leeds Civic Hall on 18June.

“Campaign! Make an Impact” project a great success

peacemuseum — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:13:03 +0000

For the past six months (December 2009 to June 2010) The Peace Museum has been working with Year 8 students from Bradford Academy on an innovative project called Campaign! Make an Impact.

Campaign! Make an Impact is a cross-curricular programme that uses history to inspire young people into active citizenship. It is a national programme in partnership with the MLA Council and The British Library that is being rolled out across England in 2009/11, funded through the DCMS/DCSF Strategic Commissioning Programme.

Campaign! Make an Impact uses historical campaigns to inspire and teach campaign skills, enabling children and young people to run their own campaigns about issues that affect them today.

Three-step model

It works through a three-step model that first encourages schools and local museums to work together, using museum collections and classroom resources to help young people understand historical campaigns.

Next, the students explore the creative techniques that were used by historical campaigners. Finally, they run a campaign on a subject of their own choosing such as bullying, knife crime or the environment.

Bringing history and citizenship together deepens the learning experience. Young people leave the programme feeling that they know and are able to change aspects of their world, a valuable lesson that helps increase self esteem.

Anti-nuclear campaigning

The Peace Museum’s project with Bradford Academy focused on historical anti-nuclear campaigning. During the project students were provided an overview of the Atomic Age from 1945 to the present day. They examined issues surrounding the dropping of the first atomic bomb, the Cold War, the influence of atomic weapons on popular culture in the 1980s and the disarmament movement.

Students had the opportunity to have hands-on sessions with artefacts from the early anti-nuclear campaigning period, including banners, leaflets, posters, and even footage from the very first protest demonstration march to Aldermaston. Students heard about historical and present-day anti-nuclear campaigning from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and particated in a ‘Bomb Factor’ activity.

Students choose their own campaigns

The students then examined campaigning methods and selected issues that they wanted to campaign around. Working in small groups with a locally-based filmmaker the students devised their own short films to use in their campaigns and received help in developing their skills in writing, filming and editing. For their campaigns, the students at Bradford Academy chose issues that they felt were most important to their lives and in their communities, including: knife crime, animal cruelty, child abuse, drug abuse and prostitution.

The Campaign! project was a great success. The students’ campaign films were featured on the school’s intranet and highlighted in the school newsletter. Students enjoyed the project, with one student commenting that “I liked working in my group and producing something really good” and another saying that they liked “being able to pick up your own campaign and work with your friends on it.”

The Peace Museum would like to continue running more Campaign! Make an Impact projects and encourages schools to participate. Please contact the museum directly for more information.

For information about the national initiative and educational resources for developing campaigning skills and other historical campaigns please visit the Campaign! Make an Impact website.

Students’ campaign films

To view the five different campaign films the students created as part of this project, please click on The Peace Museum’s YouTube site.

Students from Bradford Academy proudly display their campaign poster against animal cruelty.

Vaulting Ambitions: Peace and Sport

peacemuseum — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:24:01 +0000

The Peace Museum aims to make a unique contribution to the London 2012 by exploring the historical and contemporary connections between sport and peace. Taking place in Yorkshire and London and involving dynamic partnerships, Vaulting Ambitions will explore the wealth of heritage relating to sport, peace and conflict resolution and its relevance to the 21st century.

Vauliting Ambitions will comprise exhibitions, story-telling/dramatisation of key heritage events, audience interactions and interventions, large-scale outdoor projections of iconic images and interviews broadcast on a number of Big Screens. Initial consultations have been had with local and national organisations and all of the groups have indicated a keen desire to actively participate in the project.

Our sporting heroes talk about peace

Part of the project will involve young people and school children interviewing contemporary sporting icons. View the project’s first such interview with world renowned cricketer Imran Khan here and check back to our website for regular updates about the project’s development.

Note: The views expressed by Imran Khan are not necessarily those of The Peace Museum.

Pupils acted as guides at Kokeshi Exhibition

peacemuseum — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:37:43 +0000

The Kokeshi Exhibition, on display at the Yorkshire Craft Centre in Bradford from 8-31 March 2010, explored the story of a Japanese girl, Sadako Sasaki, and her friends, following the atomic bomb that devastated the city of Hiroshima in 1945. ‘Kokeshi’ is a type of traditional Japanese doll that symbolises friendship.

The Kokeshi Exhibition uniquely involved using pupils as guides. These specially trained youth interpreters, or ‘Kokeshi Ambassadors’, guided school groups through the exhibition. Education Bradford first tried this model of training youth to be ambassadors to act as exhibition guides with the run of the Anne Frank + You exhibition at Cartwright Hall and Art Gallery in Bradford in 2009. At that time over 50 ‘Anne Frank Young Ambassadors’ were trained. These Ambassadors have gone on to peer educate other primary and secondary school pupils, passing on their skills and knowledge to others who took on the role of Bradford’s ‘Kokeshi Ambassadors’.

The Kokeshi Exhibition featured a multimedia big picture show, children’s art work and posters based on materials donated to Education Bradford by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and banners and panels on loan from The Peace Museum, Bradford. The exhibition was curated by staff from Education Bradford’s Diversity and Cohesion team and Carlton Bolling City Learning Centre as part of a wider community cohesion initiative.

The exhibition ran from 8-31 March at the Yorkshire Craft Centre at Bradford College.

The Peace Museum at PeaceJam 2010

peacemuseum — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:12:58 +0000

The Peace Museum took part in the fourth annual PeaceJam youth conference in Bradford 5-7 March 2010. Over 170 young people aged 13-19 came to the University of Bradford to spend the weekend in the company of Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of East Timor José Ramos-Horta and to learn about peace building. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘eradicating extreme poverty’ and The Peace Museum was one of eight external organisations running workshops in relation to the conference theme.

The Peace Museum’s interactive workshop entitled “What’s the message?” involved particpants in exploring the theme of poverty using artefacts from the museum’s collection. Examing historical campaign material (posters, T-shirts, banners), students saw how people in times past campaigned against poverty. Students donned protective gloves and got to handle the artefacts. Participants were especially interested to handle the museum’s large banner entitled “It’s Us or Them” which has on one side images of how the world would look if people choose peaceful options, and on the other side, images of how the world would look if people make only violent, destructive choices. Participants then had the opportunity to design their own campaign material relating to poverty (see above right photo showing participants creating their own campaign posters).

In addtion to runnning a workshop, the museum’s Nobel Exhibition was on display throughout the conference and participating schools have subsequently expressed interest in borrowing this exhibition.

PeaceJam UK is part of an international education programme led by Nobel Peace Prize winners which started in the USA over ten years ago and now operates in nine other countries worldwide. Bradford is the only European city to host this unique event. PeaceJam aims to inspire young people to be active citizens and peacemakers and helps them choose non-violent solutions to their issues and problems, whist offering them alternative, positive role models.

The Peace Museum at Whitechapel Gallery round table

oli — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:43:40 +0000

Julie Obermeyer, The Peace Museum’s Manager, participated in a round table discussion at the Nature of the Beast exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London on Saturday, 21 November 2009.

The round table brought together artists, curators, peace activists and researchers in a lively and insightful exploration of the themes and interests at the heart of two exhibitions, The Human Cost of War, an exhibition of quilts and arpilleras curated by Roberta Bacic and recently on display at Imperial War Museum and St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London and The Nature of The Beast exhibition curated by Goshka Macuga at Whitechapel Gallery.

The discussion made links between past and present conflicts with reference to the Spanish Civil War and took place before a life-size tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica on loan from the UN. Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW) organised the round table and other events associated with the Human Cost of War exhibition.

Newsletters and Publicity

Ric — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:56:52 +0000

Download our past newsletters and read about the Museum in external publications.