Each month, staff from the Amelia and the wider council will be sharing an hour of their time with young Home Educators, giving them a hands-on introduction to their role.
Read more to find out how they get on.
14th October 2025
Home Educator Careers Taster - Session Two
Job of the month: Alexandra Curson, Audience Development and Programmes Manager (and Archaeologist!)
This month, two Home Educators took up the chance to find out what an Audience Development and Programmes Manager does.
Why did you come to the session?
Really enjoyed it last time!
Ally started by giving an overview of the many groups we engage with at The Amelia, from our youngest visitors coming in for Baby Rhyme Time, to school groups visiting for curriculum-linked workshops, to young people looking to acquire new skills, to the older generation exploring creative health offers. Ally explained that her role is essentially to find ways to make all things museum interesting to this very wide range of audiences …and more!
Ally surprised the Home Educators by telling them she started out as an archaeologist or, as she termed it, a history detective! She guided the learners through an exploration of the archaeology handling collection, where they had the chance to handle a range of objects, including a Paleolithic handaxe, Neolithic polished axe head and a Bronze Age spear head.
Ally shared fascinating facts to inspire the learners’ imaginations and helped bring home the vastness of history by showing that that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids being built!
So what was the connection between Stone Age artefacts and Ally’s role at The Amelia? It all comes back to thinking about how we can use our site and historical objects to inspire new audiences and bring more people through our doors. Why? In order to provide enriching experiences, to educate, to help support well-being and simply to bring enjoyment to ever more people.
Ally next set the Home Educators to work testing out a trail designed as a family engagement activity. Their job was to see how well it worked in action and decide which age range it would be most suitable for. Tackling their task with enthusiasm and an eye for detail, the learners identified some flaws which would need remedying and had a lively debate about the most suitable target audience. It was clear any engagement activities always need more than one pair of eyes upon them.
While neither of the participants could see themselves as Audience Developers/Programmers in the future, the word they kept coming back to as they summed up their experience of the day was FUN!
A few words from the learners to describe the environment for the workshop:
“Calm, fun - very interesting thinking about how old things are!”
“The objects really captured the imagination!”
Finally…
Let’s not forget objects can’t speak for themselves but need someone to bring their stories to life. Maybe Audience Development isn’t for these learners but Ally certainly demonstrated the power of museum objects to inspire!
The Home Educator Careers Taster series continues the second Tuesday of each month 10am-11.30am. To find out more and to book onto a session, click here.