Education
LEARNING ACTIVITIES
The Educational team offers to schools and groups the following activities:
-guided tours,
-didactic activities,
-workshops,
-hikings.
For any informations about our learning activities contact us by telephone 050-2212973 (Monday – Thursday, 9.00 – 13.00) or send an e-mail to didattica.msn@unipi.it.
TEACHERS SCHOOLING
Since 2014 the Museum has been organising meetings of training and professional updating aimed to teachers. The meetings deal with themes related to the teaching of Science at school and at the Museum.
EDUCATION CAMP DURING SCHOOL HOLIDAYS
Since 2015 the Educational Services of the Museums also offers education camp during school holidays, to facilitate families providing high-quality learning projects during school vacation, such as summer, Christmas and Easter holidays.
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM’S PATHS FOR PEOPLE SUFFERING OF ALZHEIMER DISEASE AND THEIR CAREGIVERS
The project
“Nature in your hands” is a project started in 2014 from the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa, based on a series of mettings, which take place in the Museum itself and are especially aimed for people suffering of Alzheimer disease and their caregivers.
The Museum have always been attending an accessibility policy, through the setting up of rooms by the criteria of the Universal design, through the providing of tactile experience for visually impaired people and through the creation of projects devoted to every type of visitor.
In this project, our guests are people suffering from Alzheimer or senile dementia. The meetings are aimed to provide situations offering different ways of communicating and expressing feelings, so that our guest can be included in social and cultural relation. It has been proved that the interaction with the art brings to a stress diminuition and a bettering of life quality, realtions and self-esteem. We believe that also our Museum is able to provide starting points, places and situations useful tuo improve the life quality of these people.
How the project is born
In 2013 the Museum embraced the invitation to join the project “Art in your hands”, aimed to create and propose routes into Museums for people suffering from Alzheimer disease and their caregivers. The project had started with a training seminar at the Marino Marini Museum in Florence, and had been supported by the Tuscany authorities of the Museum area and Ecomusei.
The meetings
The testing of the project took place between May and October, 2014, and since its success the activity have been prosecuted since then.
In every meeting we visited a room of the Museum, engaging our gusts in an activity of Timeslips, with the essential help of geriatric operators and psychologists.
Timeslips is a creative narration technique invented by Ann Davis Basting. This method helps people suffering from dementia to express their creativity by telling stories. Rather than force the patients to remember, this technique is aimed to encourage their immagination. During the creative process these people restate their humanity interacting with operators, family and friens. At the same time, this technique make it possible to let a wider public to know the creative potential of people suffering from these diseases, giving them back dignity as well as a social role.