A great month for our Magna Carta project

MC-ers!

Can you believe that in just a couple of days’ time the Magna Carta will be 800 years and ONE MONTH old? How time flies. It won’t be long before we’re all meeting up to celebrate the 900^th anniversary!

But enough of the future, what a past month we’ve had here at MC HQ at Oxford Brookes University. Apologies that we haven’t managed to do a blog post about this until now, we’ve just been too busy entertaining celebrity rappers and future professional artists.

Akala speaking at our Magna
Carta symposium

It all started on Thursday 18 June with our special Magna Carta symposium. This was attended by over 110 Year 9-13 students from local schools and colleges and featured a key note speech by the MOBO Award winning rapper Akala. The speech was so good that several members of our team said it was one of the best they’d ever seen, whilst the students clearly enjoyed it too as after he’d finished they chased Akala out of the lecture theatre in pursuit of selfies! After this a variety of Magna Carta themed workshops were put on by our academics, from Humans vs Robots to The Patriot Games. These went down so well that one student said ‘I think that the level of understanding that the professors and teachers have is amazing.’ This left our academics feeling very happy indeed and confirmed that the day was a big success.

Then, just a few days later on Monday 22 June we opened our A Modern Magna Carta exhibition in our own Glass Tank gallery. This exhibition features the work of local students aged between 8 and 18 who took part in our Modern Magna Carta Challenge - an invitation to young people to create their own Magna Carta reflecting the rights, liberties and freedoms they believe people should have today. We delivered some workshops in schools and colleges in support of this and then left the students to work on their ideas, and the exhibits they’ve created are both amazing and inspirational. From paintings to poems, sculptures to videos, they’ve done the lot. Staff and students from across the University have been saying how fantastic the exhibition is and on Thursday 2 July we held a special event for the artists and their parents and teachers, and they all thought it was brilliant too.

Guests visiting our A Modern Magna
Carta exhibition in the Glass Tank

And there’s good news - if you’d like to see the exhibition yourself there is still plenty of time for you to do so! It’s staying here at Oxford Brookes University until the end of next week, then we’re taking it to the Museum of Oxford for a bit of a summer holiday. Both spaces are open to the public and admission is free, so you should definitely check it out. Details, including opening times, are as follows:

The Glass Tank, Abercrombie Building, Oxford Brookes University
Monday 22 June - Friday 24 July, 2015
Open 9am-5pm, Monday-Friday

The Museum of Oxford Gallery, Oxford Town Hall
Wednesday 29 July - Thursday 20 August, 2015
Open 10am-5pm, Monday-Saturday

All that remains for us to do now in this mighty long post is to say thank you to everyone who’s been involved in these events. Thank you to Akala, the Museum of Oxford, all the staff at the University and local schools and colleges who have helped us out, and most importantly to all the young people who have gotten involved. You’ve all been a pleasure to work with and the contributions you’ve made to both the symposium and the exhibition have been outstanding. Well done and thank you!

If you’d like to send us any feedback please e-mail us at magnacarta2015@brookes.ac.uk or tweet us at @BrookesSchools. We’d love to hear from you.

We’ll be back soon with some more MC-related goodness.

Very best wishes,

The Oxford Brookes Magna Carta Team