Online course 1
About this course
This course will help people working in cultural and heritage venues and libraries find better ways to connect with young people. Young people* are often considered to be less interested in engaging with culture and heritage in their free time, but sometimes this is due to them feeling unwelcome and uncertain in venues. This can be because of invisible barriers that haven’t been considered.
Failing to engage young people now could lead to a future generation of adults disinterested in coming to or working with cultural and heritage organisations. It is therefore essential that greater effort is made to welcome and connect with young visitors, to safeguard for the future of the sector as well as meeting young people’s right to have access to quality arts and heritage.
In this course you will be supported to identify possible reasons why young people might not currently feel completely at ease in your venue. It will help you come up with practical, manageable changes you can make to encourage more teenagers to come in!
This I’m a Teenager…Get Me Into There online course has been developed by Curious Minds and is free for staff from cultural and heritage venues and libraries. It draws from a course originally created in partnership with the University of the First Age and from Curious Minds’ Hope Streets project. It includes resources created by young people working with Oldham Theatre Workshop. The course is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players.
* For this course we define young people as 13-19 year-olds, and use ‘teenagers’ interchangeably with young people. You may define young people as people aged anywhere between 11 and 30, but for the purposes of this course we are interested in the ages when people usually become more independent and may visit cultural and heritage venues by themselves or with peers for the first time.
There are 3 ways to access this course
This course is split into 6 modules
You can complete these in any order you choose, but we recommend finishing with ‘Mapping Your Venue’. Each module takes between 30-45 minutes to complete. The modules contain short pieces to read, short films and images, interactive activities, reflective exercises and more.
A Learning Experience to Suit You
You may like to take notes and share these with colleagues using our Learners’ Pack.
We don’t track your progress or assess you on this course and you can complete it at your own pace. The Learners’ Pack will help you keep track of the modules you have completed and allow you to report on your learning if you need to.
