Reinvigorating Museum Education in Jordan I A. Badran, S. Abu-Khafajah, R. Skeates I June 2020

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In this seminar we invite discussion on the nature of partnership building in and around the museum and heritage sector in Jordan. We reflect on our own experiences of trying to develop successful partnerships, gained during the first year of our AHRC Newton-Khalidi funded research-and-development project on ‘Learning from Multicultural Amman: Engaging Jordan’s Youth’. Here, as well as thinking critically about the challenges surrounding partnership working, we have sought to identify and experiment with new forms of partnership working: between museums; between museums and education providers; between government agencies and museums; and between Jordanian museum professionals and international experts. The accompanying presentation for this talk can be found here: https://cbrl.ac.uk/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/Events/Reinventing_Partnership_Reinvigorating_Museum_Education_in_Jordan_presentation.pdf About the speakers: Arwa Badran is a researcher at Durham University on an AHRC funded project on engaging the youth in museums in Jordan. After completing her BA in Archaeology at the University of Jordan, she worked as a field archaeologist for a few years before pursing higher education in museum studies at Newcastle University, where she read for an MA on building connections between museums and the public and later a PhD on the introduction of museums in school curricula. She worked as Lecturer in Museum Studies at the Hashemite University in Jordan, contributing to the establishment and development of the first BA degree in cultural heritage and museology in the Middle East. She has also worked as a consultant for UNESCO on heritage education projects in the Arab region and currently sits on the Executive Committee of the World Archaeological Congress. Shatha Abu-Khafajah is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Shatha graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her Masters degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage management from Newcastle University, acquired in 2007, enabled her to synthesize architecture and archaeology with special interest in establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-oriented. Robin Skeates is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. His research and publications explore a wide variety of themes within the overlapping fields of material, visual and sensual culture studies, and museum and heritage studies. His recent books include Museums and Archaeology (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2011).