Learning Centre

The Learning Centre provides resources generated through the Origins: Festival of First Nations Learning and Participation programme.

The most recent Festivals' Learning and Participation programmes included taking entire primary schools off timetable to experience a week of indigenous cultural activities. A huge range of artists appearing at the 205 and 2017 festivals visited the schools, offering both performances (e.g. didgeridoo, traditional dance, Native American flute, storytelling, Scissor dance) and workshops (e.g. embroidery, haka, boomerangs, lacrosse, cookery). Pupils were taken around the British Museum, artists and heritage experts guided them around the 2015 Indigenous Australia exhibition, the 2017 Pacific North-West exhibition, as well as other indigenous galleries.

The programme also worked with a secondary school’s Modern Foreign Language class exploring Spanish speaking indigenous cultures, particularly Peru. Pupils engaged with indigenous dance, embroidery, food, Quechua language and the history of Peru.

A young refugee group also participated in the programme through a series of weekly practical workshops exploring a variety of different indigenous cultural practices and art forms.

Downloadable here are the Education Resource Packs for the Learning and Participation programmes are run in conjunction with the festival. These will be of particular interest to teachers and educators of history, citizenship, and religious studies, though they each cover a range of issues concerning indigenous and First Nations cultures. 

These Education Packs Tare made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence.  

For further resources and links click here.