Blog

At The Golden Hinde, we feel extremely grateful to be able to welcome thousands of visitors every year from schools all over the world.

We have always sought to offer the best possible education programmes for our visiting schools.

Fairly recently, however, we decided that it would be useful to devise a checklist to refer to whenever we’re creating new workshops or updating existing ones. It’s also been incredibly helpful when training new facilitators to help them think about the aims of our programming.

We wanted to share our checklist with you.

• Multisensory and Hands-on

One of our main focuses at The Golden Hinde is to share something of what life might have been like for 16th century mariners. Whilst we’d never claim to be a time machine, exploring the carefully reconstructed physical environment of the ship (with its sights, smells and sounds) allows visitors to begin to comprehend a historical lived experience through multisensory engagement. Our school programmes champion this, encouraging pupils to use all their senses and engage physically with our replica ship. They’ll raise the anchor, taste the rations, feel the weight of weapons and crawl along the gundeck.

• Encourages Enquiry

Developing the skills surrounding historical enquiry is an essential part of history education and therefore a key focus of our programmes. Many of our workshops and tours either centre around a key historical question (e.g.: Why did the English defeat the Spanish in 1588) or pose smaller mysteries throughout (e.g.: What is this? Who used it? What is it for?) Visiting school groups are guided through their investigations by our facilitators and encouraged to share their findings.

• Stimulates Dialogue and Debate

After our visiting schools have engaged in an enquiry, we want them to share their findings and offer each other different perspectives. Our programmes are designed to offer chances to present discoveries and encourage students to engage in debate.

• Fun and Playful

We believe in learning through play at all ages. Having fun fosters enthusiasm for the subject and stimulates creativity and imagination. At The Golden Hinde, you can expect to finish a weapons workshop with a foam sword fight, race with barrels along the gundeck or take part in a role play mutiny.

• Carefully Researched

This one is straightforward. It’s obviously important to us that all the information in our programmes is carefully researched and accurately presented.

• Complements Curriculum

The Golden Hinde sits at the heart of the National Curriculum for KS1-5. We have visiting students who are learning about anything from explorers, pirates, the Tudors, empire, the Spanish Armada or Elizabethan voyages. It’s really important to us that their visit builds on what they’ve been doing in the classroom and helps them better understand their topic.

• Accessible and Inclusive

It’s vital to us to provide for all kinds of learners from all kinds of backgrounds. We ensure our programmes are designed to be flexible enough to work for groups or individuals who might learn differently or who are differently abled.

• Anti-Racist

We recognise that the histories which surround our ship are rooted in colonialism and slavery: elements which can often be side-lined in stories of Francis Drake’s voyages. We’re working to ensure that our programmes explore these issues with sensitivity, confronting mythologisation and erasure and championing unheard voices.

• Fosters Imaginative Engagement

The Golden Hinde is an evocative space, and we’re often visited by writers, historians and even artists looking to foster an affective, imaginative engagement with the past. We work to encourage visiting schools to do the same. Our facilitators are trained to welcome and explore emotional responses to the ship and link it to the area of historical study. Many of our post-visit resources offer the chance to respond with art, creative writing or performance.