Train the trainer at Ashby-de-la-Zouch Museum

Ashby-de-la-Zouch Museum

A group of museum and heritage professionals from across the Midlands came together for a three day training session at Ashby-de-la-Zouch Museum, led by Curiosity Creative. The aim was to equip the group with the skills to run their own digital storytelling sessions in the future, and to explore ways that digital storytelling can be used by museums.

As with all our training sessions [LINK TO TRAINING SECTION], attendees create their own digital stories as a way of learning how to run their own digital storytelling workshops - the best way to appreciate what you are expecting of your potential workshop participants is to experience it yourself.

We began with storytelling, learning how to draw out participants’ personal stories. The next stage is writing scripts, with the group giving each other feedback in the supportive Story Circle environment. This is always an exciting part of the process when you hear people’s stories for the first time.

The final day involved pulling all the visuals together and building story timelines in the movie-making software. We introduced the group to a couple of photo editing apps and they worked hard to bring their stories together ready for the world premiere of their stories at the end of the day.

Since the session, a number of the trainees have gone on to deliver successful workshops at various locations in the Midlands.

"Curiosity Creative ran a three day Training the Trainer course in Digital Storytelling at Ashby Museum in July 2013. Three people from Ashby Museum, including myself, took part and colleagues from some other museums and organisations also joined us.

We all enjoyed the course very much. Before it started I wondered how it could be made to last for three days but all the activities were very interesting and worthwhile. We were a fairly mixed bunch, some confident at story writing, others not and so the initial story circle exercises helped everyone to build up their skills and confidence and were interesting in their own right. Some of us had not met before and the story circle activities helped us to get to know each other better too.

The final exercise where we created our own digital stories was very enjoyable. There were a variety of topics, some describing childhood experiences, some about more recent experiences and some inspired by a single object. Illustrations included old photographs and new. One participant had no illustrations of his story so he drew some himself!

After the course, I went on to run a digital storytelling project for a small group of adults from the local parish church. Not being a church member myself, these people were not known to me before the project started but we certainly knew each other by the end. The participants had no idea what to expect, despite my attempts to explain in the advertising, but they really enjoyed the project and felt that they had achieved something very worthwhile. Some had no computer skills at all but they managed to succeed.

Some of the stories were about the first or Second World War and were very moving. I was delighted to have been able to give them this opportunity and am very grateful to Curiosity Creative for making it all possible."
Wendy Freer