Shakespeare Week is a national annual celebration in the UK giving teachers, families and children opportunities to explore Shakespeare’s life and work by taking part in creative and cross-curricular activities. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust supports teachers by providing access to tools and educational resources that will allow them to open-up their classroom to the world of Shakespeare, and create meaningful experiences for their students. This paper focuses on a work in partnership between the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/), Makewaves (https://www.makewav.es/) and Coventry University (http://www.coventry.ac.uk/) in a study that centres around Shakespeare Week 2017. It presents the introduction of Open Badges in the learning provision of a cultural institution, and lays out a vision for how badging might work to reveal, recognise, support, and reward learning and learning pathways for teachers and children when engaged in cultural activities in and beyond the classroom.
Open Badges are generally regarded as a “lightweight and trusted mechanism” (Sharples et al., 2013, p.14) that motivates curricular, extracurricular activities and lifelong learning (in Boticki et al. 2015), and may be appreciated outside the context in which one’s badges were originally earned by providing a record of the skills and achievements that learners gain through their participation in various programs (Davis & Singh, 2015). This paper focuses on the initial phases of the research study that sought to build an application for the administration and distribution of open badges to schools, teachers and children during the Shakespeare Week. The current scheme, consisting of nine badges, serves to complement and extent the trust’s existing provision (i.e. Passports to Shakespeare). The badges are seen as a way to 1. acknowledge achievement in a professional development context (CPD Badge) and 2. encourage and recognise participation in activities (Participation/Learning Badges).
The paper provides evidence collected by the stakeholders, i.e. project staff and teachers with an aim to focus on their views around the open badges concept, and evaluation of technology deployed. Data consists of focus group interviews with the trust’s Teachers’ Steering Group (n=12), interviews with the trust’s staff (n=4) and survey data from school and museum practitioners across the country. Quantitative data collected on the Makewaves will also be presented.
In summary, the paper aims to examine an open badging system within a cultural setting, and highlight matters that need to be considered in future implementation by institutions in this sector. Its findings are important for both researchers and practitioners that seek to use networked technologies to open-up learning settings, and connect learning experiences.
Boticki, I. et al. (2015). Usage of a mobile social learning platform with virtual badges in a primary school. Computers & Education 86, pp.120–136.
Davis, K. and Singh, S. (2015) Digital badges in afterschool learning: Documenting the perspectives and experiences of students and educators. Computers & Education, 88, p.72–83
Sharples et al. (2013) Innovating Pedagogy 2013. Innovation Report 2. The Open University: Milton Keynes