Anniversaries and celebrations provide an opportunity to collect and share material which stir memories and stories. The Northern Territory Education Mob works together with schools to grow knowledge about the history of the school and community, record information about those resources and create new records. The material is then kept accessible on the Digital Keeping Place.
With your help and support, we can assist develop materials which will contribute to the celebration.
Some celebrations we have assisted with:
Shepherdson College Elcho Island (2024) 50 Years of Bilingual Education Areyonga School Celebration (2023) 50 Years of Bilingual Education Ti Tree School (2019) 50 year anniversary of the school. Kormilda College (2017) 50 year anniversary of the school.
Poster prepared for Kormilda College Celebration - Graham Benjamin 1967-1971 Click on image to download pdf of the poster
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| For ideas about activities for your celebration explore this book produced by Shepherdson College about their 50 Years of Bilingual Education celebrations. |
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How we can help you help us
Working towards a celebration is a great way to identify and collect resources for and about a school or program. We are happy to work with you to locate, digitise and return records to assist with your celebration. We can work with you to act as brokers with former educators and keeping institutions across Australia to get the resources.
Some of the work will cost money and we can work with you to seek grants to support what you want to do.
Former educators often hold a wealth of material in their private collections. These might be in photo albums, slides, super8s old documents like school magazines, class books, or books in language. Knowing that there is a forthcoming celebration often galvanises people to look in cupboards, sheds and the like for old material.
In our experience people are most generous. Some have already digitised their records, others have not and we work with them to make this happen. Very few are not willing to share and help where they can, including attending the celebration.
Digital Return
We can, on receipt of a letter of authority, broker the digital return of records from collecting institutions across Australia. If their records are not digitised, it can take time. Often these places charge for the service.
In our experience most are happy to wave the cost in return for more information about the records, including which images they can share on their website. We request permission for the records to be used for personal and education purposes (at a minimum), and if the copyright permits, to be being added to our Digital Keeping Place.
We also request permission to make wider use of the material (e.g. to download, copy and make new resources) if the collecting institutions rights to the material allow them to pass on these permissions to us.
Assistance with creating new records
Depending on the level or resourcing and time available, we can work together to create new resources. These might be posters, postcards, timelines, calendars, books.
How you can help us - permissions and information
As well as giving back the individual images to community, we collect information from the community about the people, places and activities in the images, and have conversations about whether there are any cultural reasons that the images should not be added to digital keeping places.
Celebrations are a wonderful opportunity to collect this information and share your knowledge and connect with colleagues and community members to share their stories.
We have found that putting the images into an album with a cultural warning allows information (who, what, when, where) to be gathered.
A tick and cross about whether or not the images can be published helps us and keeping places know what can and can't be done. Any information gathered about the images is added to our Digital Keeping place to help people discover the images in the future.
Planning ahead
Different places have different capacities to manage celebrations. There is always a balance between the ideal and the real as the day to day consumes everyone's attention!
Like you, we have limited resources, however we have a lot of experience about what might be possible and can reach out through a vast network to see what we can achieve together and how best this might be done.
If you would like us to help, we suggest you set a date early. Having a 'go to' person and a place-based committee that meets regularly to manage cultural sensitivity, permissions and give input and feedback to plans is always best.
For more information about our processes see What we do & how we work.