Play, Craft, Design, Feel: Engaging Students and the Public with Victorian Culture

Abstract

Hadjiafxendi and Plunkett have used experiential learning in their individual teaching and research, and this chapter reflects on its benefits and limits. Their work on nineteenth-century material culture, handicrafts, and optical toys and devices, details the development of experiential learning in Victorian culture, and they have correspondingly used hands-on learning as a pathway to engage students. Play and performance can also engage different publics with Victorian culture, opening up research opportunities through co-production with creative practitioners and heritage institutions. Victorian popular science particularly lends itself to public engagement activities through its focus on embodied learning, and this chapter describes a joint project with Ilfracombe Museum, ‘Science at the Seaside,’ which devised a public program of art, literature, science and handicraft activities that sought to engage tourists and families with the Victorian fashion for marine biology and the well-known literary and scientific figures attracted by the north Devon coast.