Evaluating Heritage Projects

Rob Walker University of East Anglia

November 2013

Short talk given to the Ideasbank Celebration Ickworth House Suffolk November 2013

Ideasbank is a network of local heritage projects in the East of England, supported by the University of

East Anglia and funded by the HLF and AHRC.

• I had a plan. I was going to talk about some of the key ideas in Evaluation and explain to you why I found these interesting and exciting. After all this is what academics do. But the plan has come unstuck and I have decided to do something else. Inspired by the presentations here today, I want to talk to you about a photograph.

• Looking at the displays here today I realise that this is many ways a very ordinary photograph, much like many you have encountered in your projects. But to me it has personal meaning. It is a wedding photograph, taken by H.J.Jarman, a Bury St Edmunds photographer in the early years of the twentieth century, in a village just a few miles from here. It is a wedding photograph, of my grandparents' wedding.

• Some years ago I showed this picture to Bev Labbett, a friend and colleague who lived in the town. He saw straightaway that the photograph brings together two families from different classes. There are two sides to the picture, one better off and one relatively poor. Bev could see this in dress and in the way people stood and sat. I was aware of this distinction as background, but having it identified so clearly explained many things about the way people in the family related to one another and spoke of each other. It was a revelation.

• My Granny told a different story. Her story was always about the boy seated on the ground in front of her and carrying a shepherd's crook. He was her nephew and a favourite child. A few years later he signed up for the army and left for the front. He died on Armistice Day, shot by a sniper's bullet.

• There is a message here for Evaluation. Evaluation deals in stories, multiple stories and crossing interpretations. We sometimes forget this because we have got used to a particular bureaucratic form of evaluation in which we tick boxes, collect responses, collate them and pass them up the line for others to assess and interpret.

• Evaluation need not be just about reaching targets and documenting compliance. All research projects are complex, and especially so in the realm of the human and the social.

• Your projects each involve the public and the personal, the formal and the informal. They uncover old stories and create new ones, and often these are identified with an image or a single artefact which represents the project as a whole. Above all they are projects that involve learning, and those who learn most are those most involved.

• The key question for Evaluation is to judge the educational significance of your project. How differently do you view your locality as a result of your work together? What have you learned that would help someone else setting out on a similar venture? What would you do differently, knowing what you now know? What would it be helpful for the university and the HLF to know? What can you tell them that might help them do better next time?

• And, most importantly, what memories, and what stories, can you share?,