Learning and education volunteer Katherine Wills shares her thoughts on the beauty and adventure of her year at the Palace.
Hello, my name is Katherine and I’ve been volunteering with the Palace’s learning and education team for about a year now - and wow, has it gone fast!
Reflecting on a year of volunteering, I have to say one of the greatest joys has been witnessing the passing of each season in such a beautiful location.
From admiring the Christmas decorations
and illuminated light trail (accompanied by a very generous mountain of whipped cream from the cafe - thanks Vlady!), to celebrating the bloom of the first flowers as we entered Spring, I’m now getting to admire once more the rich oranges and yellows of the falling leaves as I enter my second autumn volunteering at the Palace.
I volunteer with the school membership scheme, a programme that began last year and offers facilitated workshops across the Palace and garden, additional learning resources and professional development sessions to teachers. My favourite part about supporting this scheme is how varied each task is: I’ve done a number of activities from designing pre-visit welcome packs, photography, sorting historical costumes, hand-delivering materials to local schools, to supporting public events. I have time-travelled from the Romans to Victorians, helped replant vegetable beds in the garden and handled some mildly disturbing toys from the past. In the summer, I was also lucky to attend an incredible training session for teachers where we had the walled garden to ourselves, practising sensory learning activities (which may or may not have included a variant of hide-and-seek) and creating our own poetry zines.
As a PhD student, who often spends large amounts of time on my own either in libraries or archives, getting the opportunity to share my love for all things historical with children and young people - as well as the amazing adults who support them - has been a really special opportunity. When Alex, the learning producer, suggested I could create an education resource with material from the archives, I also naturally became very excited! I decided to focus on Pocahontas’s (Amonute, as she was called by the Mattaponi tribe) meeting with the Bishop of London in 1617, as it was recorded by Samuel Purchas (a complicated seventeenth century travel writer and editor that I look at in my own research). Intersecting with the Palace’s timeline of resistance work, and comparing seventeenth century English accounts of the visit to Mattaponi oral histories, I wanted to encourage secondary school students to reflect on what kinds of sources we can use to learn about the past, and ask whose stories we get to tell.
As I go into my second year volunteering at the Palace, I am excited to see where the role will take me next, and keep sharing and exploring the rich, layered history of Fulham Palace (with hopefully some more whipped cream along the way).