Our museums and galleries house fascinating collections, from living bugs to The Beatles, fine art to photography, the Titanic to ancient Egypt.
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Our museums and galleries house fascinating collections, from living bugs to The Beatles, fine art to photography, the Titanic to ancient Egypt.
Education & Communities
Make the link, break the chain won the International Award at the UK Museums and Heritage Awards for Excellence 2008.
It is always nice to win awards but probably the best measure of success for this project has been the number of schools wanting to take part in 'Make the link, be the change', our second international school twinning project. This focuses on climate change and is running again in partnership with Plan UK. Fifty North West based schools signed up to participate in this project, working with schools in Togo, Malawi, El Salvador, Brazil, Philippines, India and Kenya.
This success has come on the back of one of the films produced for the project being selected to be shown at 'Youth Producing Change' at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Learn more here.
2007 marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the UK. Slavery was finally abolished in the Americas in 1888, but despite this many people continued and still continue to live in slavery. It is estimated that today 20 million people across the world are slaves.
To mark the anniversary of the abolition National Museums Liverpool worked with the children's development agency, Plan UK on Make the Link, Break the Chain; an anti-slavery project linking schools along the slave triangle. The slave triangle was a shipping route linking European ports (including Liverpool), West Africa and the Americas. It resulted in Africans being taken into slavery in the Americas, and slave-produced goods being taken to Europe. You can learn more about the slavery triangle in this feature.
During the project pupils from Brazil, Haiti, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Liverpool have worked together using an online communication system to explore three core questions:
Using forums, email and a nine-lesson plan, the pupils have been looking at the experiences of countries directly affected by the slave trade and how this has shaped their own country. They are also looking at case studies of modern slavery and how it can be tackled and prevented in future. The results of their collaboration are shown here.
