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Volunteers and the Volunteering Experience
From PETT-Wiki
Volunteers make an important contribution to the life and work of the Archive and Study Centre; and we aim to make the experience memorable and useful for Volunteers in turn. If you are interested in helping at the Archive, contact the Archivist by clicking here.
- If you are seeking archives experience before applying to one of the archives courses:
- I like to stress the importance of gaining archives experience in other settings as well. We have had a great deal of help from Gloucestershire Archives over the years, and at a key stage in developing structures and procedures we had the invaluable help of then recently-qualified Teresa Wilmshurst as a full-time assistant archivist. I am confident that the fundamentals are sound, therefore, and that you won't be sent wildly astray as a training professional. But any organisation which has been under one person's influence since its beginning will inevitably reflect their limitations and idiosyncracies. You should have a rich experience here; but to ensure a rounded experience, do aim to find placements in other archives also. (Craig Fees)
And please see what others have said:
Contents |
What Former Volunteers Have Said:
October 2006: From the Trust's Visitors' Book
Two day-volunteers in October 2006:
"Enjoyed the day - look forward to coming back!"
"beautiful location, peaceful work environment - fantastic!"
May 2007: Sophie Kuerth-Landwehr
My time as a volunteer in Toddington
"Better today, than tomorrow" was the most important line I received in an email last year, in November. After many months of waiting to get a place in a social project through the European Volunteering Service, and in the end seven disappointing attempts, my mother Elke had the brilliant idea of contacting Craig at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, in Toddington. This is a unique archive and research library for books and materials related to therapeutic work with children and adults with problems. During my time here the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the Centre for the History of Medicine of the Medical School of the University of Birmingham have come together to create an Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments. It is designated a research and study centre for the University of Birmingham, it is based here in Toddington, and my work as a volunteer has already made a contribution to it.
My name is Sophie, I'm twenty years old and from Giessen in Germany. My mum Elke worked as a volunteer herself, in New Barns School, twenty-five years ago. New Barns was on the site of the Archive and Study Centre.
After I finished A-level last year in July, I didn't want to start studying again at once. I preferred some time for work experience, and to have some time to think over and to decide what I really want to study.
One wish I had was to live in a foreign country for a time, to improve my language skills and get to know another culture. But as already said, I got no place through the European Volunteering Service, and in fact that's the reason why I'm here now. And I haven't regretted it.
When I arrived in Toddington in the middle of February, I had no idea what to expect. Three months in a really small village near Cheltenham, working with people I didn't know, and talking a different language seemed to promise a period full of new experiences - a new beginning.
I'm a volunteer in the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, and this is the place where I spend most of my working-time. But if we have groups in the Centre I really like to help in the kitchen and do the serving as well.
In my first two weeks I got to know the archive pretty well, because I compiled a survey/map of the archival holdings in preparation for a conservation audit by Gloucestershire Archives.
After that period I had a variety of different tasks, such as archiving photographs of different units and social-therapeutic communities, and listing new books, journals and magazines. Especially the last one took me quite a long time. Just one of the collections of books and journals - from the personal library of an American-based British psychotherapist, whose estate was referred to us by the British Psycho Analytical Society - filled 19 boxes.
The work of listing hundreds and hundreds of books may seem to be an odd and boring way to spend your time, but in fact I thought it was really interesting to discover the material and the variety of the subjects. Books say a lot about the person they belong to, especially if you have over 300 to look at, and especially if they sometimes have notes and inscriptions in them.
Another wonderful task was working on the material of the Caldecott Community, which we received after I arrived this year. The Caldecott Community is a unique school in providing long-term care for children with behavioural difficulties or 'specialist residential education in a therapeutic environment' in Mersham-le-Hatch in Kent.
Leila M. Rendel founded the community in 1911 in the back streets of St.Pancras for children of poor families of the district. She was a remarkable woman who had trained as a teacher and although influenced by the Montessori method, she brought many new and original ideas to her day nursery and school.
Between leaflets and documents in the Caldecott Community collection I discovered a personal collection of poems and inspirational quotations gathered by Leila M. Rendel (1882-1969) the co-founder and director of the Caldecott Community, carefully written out in her clear and distinctive handwriting. And an album, filled with beautiful, professionally sketched rural scenes in pencil, the earliest from 1834. Such treasures!
Another interesting task was researching different therapeutic environments, such as Dartmouth House in London, which was a residential centre for single mothers with young children; and Hollymoor Hospital, in Birmingham, which is famous as the site of the Army's Northfield Experiments during World War II, where the term "therapeutic community" is often said to have been coined.
In addition, in anticipation of the arrival of a team of researchers from the University of Ghent in Belgium, I compiled a homepage about the Austrian-born American psychotherapist Fritz Redl, collecting information about his life and his pioneer work in Chicago, and searching out sources of information in the archives and library here.
In my time at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust I've learned a lot about the history of psycho-education, psychology and therapeutic communities in general.
In addition to that my computer working skills became better, like working with Word and Excel, doing Internet research, or creating a homepage.
I've got an impression about archival work methods, about how to handle material properly - and don't be too fast in throwing things away. J And of course I've improved my English…
I have only had three months in England, but I've got to know quite a lot of people in this time. On the one hand there are my colleagues in the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, who welcomed me so warmly, and with whom the working time was and is always a delight. On the other hand there are the people of the village and the church I've met. It wasn't hard to integrate myself really quickly!
I really thank them all for being so kind and comforting to me, and I'm really sad that I have to leave. But I'm coming back - for sure!!!
June 2007: Elaine Boyling
Where is she now?: Elaine is based in the Archive and Study Centre, pursuing a PhD in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham
I found the Planned Environment Therapy Trust listed in the Society of Archivist's work experience placements lists. Unsure, as ever, what I was up to, I wrote to Dr. Craig Fees to ask about visiting. From his first email response, and from what I found about PETT on the internet, things felt interesting. That was compared to the other archivists I talked to, who mostly seemed to want me to leave them alone (fair enough...), and compared to the other archives that on the whole looked like good places to get impressive-sounding work experience, but not particularly fascinating in themselves.
Best of all, my mess of a CV didn't scare Craig Fees off, although my complete lack of experience in archives, and my background in social anthropology, music and writing did leave him asking "why archives?" But my twinge of curiosity was inevitably ignited by the possible projects he suggested, and particularly one thing he said: "archives lend themselves to creative expression. It's one of their best-kept secrets."
So I wanted to visit in part to meet Craig Fees, because he wrote like he cared about what he did, and about the archives, and had an edge of not turning off all the strange ambiguous subtle things that make life difficult and interesting.
Not to pretend I understand very much about PETT, but it seems to be a friendly, people-fueled and glued-together place. Craig warned me that the archives weren't typical or necessarily as ideally arranged as other places, that the fact that he had set them up on his own, his own way, meant they had limitations that other places might not have, but with different benefits. He also warned me that the work could be boring.
To the sound of the group of children on a trip from the Czech Republic having an English lesson in the room next door ("Heeeee's UGLY" "sheeeeee's UGLY" "David Beckham is HANDsome," cheers and disagreement from the kids), Craig showed me around the building and the archives. In perhaps 3 minutes he gave me a brief story and background of some of the objects in the archives, any of which could have taken up hours and kept interesting. The painting by Mary Barnes stuck in my head in particular, someone I knew nothing about before, I'm glad I do now. There was something satisfying about a place where objects from dismantled hospitals and from a school for disturbed boys, along with bits of the personal collections of people involved in the therapeutic community one way or another, where all these objects were kept together. They kept their meaning beyond being lumps of stone or wood, or a book as its contents rather than as an object with its own history. And being kept together gave them a different meaning. Really what I mean is that the archives seemed like a very valuable place, because it was a way to find information, but especially to find out about people - it hadn't flattened them out.
What Craig had lined up for me was to scan projection slides into the computer. The slides were of artwork by young people that Maurice Bridgeland had worked with. He had used the slides at a couple of talks he had done recently for the trust, which were to be put onto a cd to make them easier to use. At the same time, Craig let me watch the videos of the lectures which he had been digitising, on the small screen on the video camera.
I knew nothing at all about Maurice Bridgeland. I still know very little - trying to preserve what it was like to watch the videos and look at the pictures without expecting anything, I am trying to write this without reading too much about him or anything he has written, which is difficult.
Listening on headphones, Maurice Bridgeland's voice filled up much more room than the small space of the video screen. It filled up much more space than the conference room that the lectures had taken place in. It wasn't just Maurice Bridgeland's voice anyway, as much as he brought the talk to life. It was the words he was saying, poems written by the young people, and in the other lecture Maurice's stories of a few of the people and their cases and experiences with therapy.
He described the writings and the subjects of the paintings as "the things that go unsaid." In his presentation though, part of what appeared to be important to him was not saying things; or at least to not try to speak for the young people or take credit for the differences they made to their own lives through the therapy. To say that someone had an experience that, strange as it might seem to some people, they were convinced was not a dream or hallucination, is one thing. To comment on that experience and define it as either 'real' or 'unreal' is beside the point. What matters is what the person experienced, and what they have to say about it. As Craig told me (and I hope I haven't mangled what he meant) effective therapy is a very particular kind of kind of observation, and perhaps, like music, half of learning how to play is learning which notes to leave out.
When I said it was difficult to write this without reading anything Maurice Bridgeland has written, the trouble is that I want to. I liked the way he talked, and the things he observed about the people. In the time it took to scan the box of slides into the computer I watched one video at least twice and the other one once and a bit. I got a little addicted to hearing some parts again. The writings and paintings dealt with identity, and position in a world, in space and to other people. They questioned relations of gender, love, violence and God. There was isolation, sadness, anger, confusion, bliss and freedom. Sometimes it was the simplicity of being honest that made them compelling, other times it was a nasty twist of humour. I stayed at the archives later than I probably should have, finishing scanning all the slides, to see all the paintings. I think I was worried if I missed one I would be missing a fundamental truth about life, or at least the perception of life. Because in the art of those people brought together by Maurice Bridgeland there was always a struggle to understand, to look for something underneath and behind the surface, but at the same time to acknowledge that to absolutely commit yourself to looking for the Truth might mean accepting that it doesn't exist.
July 2007: Sharon Boyle
Where is she now?: Helped, we can hope, by a warm recommendation from the archivist, Craig Fees, Sharon has been accepted onto the very competitive Liverpool University Archives course.
My work experience at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive
I have worked at the Planned Environment Trust Archive for two and a half weeks and it has been a very enjoyable, challenging and useful experience.
My project involved doing some work relating to one of the Trust's founders, David Wills. During the 1930's, he served as warden of an educational settlement in Risca, Wales, an area which was suffering the effects of massive unemployment. He put together a photograph album that records the people he met and the events that happened at that time. My task was to finish scanning some of these photos; search for and compile information to tell the story of what happened at Risca; then build a web-page, with the story and the photographs of Risca, and an appeal for information; then put together a press release and contact the press serving the Risca area.
The research part of my task provided an opportunity to read sections of David Wills' (unpublished) autobiography and also some of his correspondence. It was a real privilege to be able to do this, as not many people have had access to these materials. They revealed not only some important historical details necessary for my project, but also that the writer had been a thoughtful, sensitive and insightful individual. The letters were particularly fascinating to me; it was so interesting to see correspondence dating back seventy years and to get a sense of the issues David Wills had been involved in and the people he had known.
The next part of my task involved scanning the photos, and using the software 'Picasa' to convert them into a format that would allow them to be easily uploaded onto a website. I particularly enjoyed cropping and straightening the photos. The originals of course looked good, but it was satisfying to tidy them up so they would 'look their best' for the web site. Actually building the web site was a time-consuming and sometimes challenging process, but when all of the work was done and the photos had been named, it was really rewarding to see the faces of the people of 1930's Risca smiling back at us.
I researched local Welsh newspapers and historical societies we could contact with news of the project (thus improving my knowledge of Welsh geography dramatically!) and at the time of writing was waiting for responses.
Doing all of this took up the majority of my time in Toddington, but I was also able to learn a little about the process of accessioning, and how materials have to be numbered and recorded before they find a permanent place in the archive. This time the materials had been gifted by David Gribble, a leading figure in the alternative schools' movement.
I was satisfied with what I had achieved in terms of getting the web site completed and contacting the press. It would have been nice to gauge the press reaction and even better, see members of the public contacting us with what they know about the photos, but this is something that will hopefully begin to happen in the next couple of weeks. Further projects could be finding out the best way of conserving the Risca photographs and then going ahead with the process. Creating a similar web site for the photos we have in our collection of Bodenham, a school for children with educational and emotional difficulties, would also be a worthwhile task. The scope of the Risca task could even be broadened a little by contacting historical societies devoted to the preservation of South Wales' coal mining history, to see if they are interested in what we have.
Not only have I been given a very thorough and structured introduction into the world of archives, but I've also learnt a lot about the therapeutic community, the people who feature prominently in it, and about the struggles faced by the people of Wales during the Depression.
To see the web-site Sharon created, Click Here
