This chapter is an excellent foundation base of knowledge for effective primary geography and includes a rationale and a clear sense of progression and purpose from Foundation to Key Stage 2 in which distinctive skills such as enquiry and mapwork are clearly explained.
Today's children need to be given the luxury of &'wandering free&'; and we can do that by using the essential ingredient of fieldwork.
Set the scene. Go, with sketch pad and camera, to your nearest open space (park, heath, playing field, golf course). Ask pupils to imagine themselves as authors collecting views and impressions of the landscape in which they want to set a story.
Find out how different things relate to each other e.g. the slope, the woods and grass, the fields, the footpaths. What barriers are there?
This page on the GA website was originally set up in response to floods in the UK in 2014, but the resources can be used to teach about flooding in general. This page contains information, case studies and links for teachers, including the use of GIS, maps of UK weather patterns responsible for the storms, causes and effects of flooding and possible links to climate change.
Geographical enquiry is now firmly established in the geography curriculum, at least on paper. Despite, however, having being given a prominent place in curriculum documents there is still evidence that it is not yet been fully adopted in schools. The Action Plan for Geography seeks to address these issues and in the last few years' progress has been made in making improvements to the curriculum. The focus on &'curriculum making&'; and revisions to the curriculum provide increased opportunities to develop more enquiry based learning in geography which can be initiated through PGCE courses.
Fieldwork is an essential component of geography education. It enables pupils to better understand the ‘messiness’ of ‘geographical reality’, develop subject knowledge, and gain a range of skills that are difficult to develop in the classroom alone. This resource area on the GA website aims to help teachers to introduce and develop fieldwork with students in both primary and second schools. It acts as a portal to existing resources on this and other websites, rather than as a self contained programme of guidance and activities.
In this six-minute video on the Geographical Association website, aimed at A level and university students, Professor Danny Dorling looks at the geography of elections both in the UK and in Europe. Danny demonstrates that voting in the UK is heavily influenced by locality and demographics, and how the UK’s place in Europe is somewhat determined by the position of the country’s political parties. This video is just one in a series of videos from Danny Dorling’s Keynote Address, the other videos can be found on the following page: www.geography.org.uk/resources/videocasts/
The Where Will I Live? project emphasised conceptual learning. Concepts help students to organise and retain important ideas and skills in a discipline. They provide coherence.
The use of concepts in curriculum planning enables teachers to be more selective about what they teach. The breadth of study (coverage) is important but many topics and places exemplify the same concepts and conceptual understanding. Good teaching involves making informed judgements about the selection of places and geographical processes to be explored.
The new national curriculum for England aims to ensure that all pupils develop 'contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places'. This type of knowledge can be enabling as it helps pupils to understand the characteristics of a place or region, the ways in which it is changing,
why people might feel attached to it and so on (Keeping up with curriculum change by Alan Kinder, Teaching Geography Summer 2013). Both India and China must feature on any list of globally significant places. The connections these countries enjoy with the UK and their dizzying rate of change and development make them exciting places to include on your Key Stage 3 curriculum. The ideas and resources below are from lesson 1 of The rise and rise of China: where does China go from here? by Nicole Lyons and Lesson 1 from Introducing India: what are the opportunities and challenges for the future? by Catherine Owen. Both are available to buy from the GA online shop.
This unit is aimed at geography subject leaders and those with responsibility for managing the curriculum in primary schools. In this section we: suggest some activities that might get you started on gathering evidence of the geography in your school, and
point you towards using the Primary Geography Quality Mark (PGQM) framework to help you to evaluate geography in your school.
Part One will consider the teacher's active and creative role in developing the curriculum at the level of courses and outline schemes of work for the key stage and year group. It covers definitions and purposes, sequences of planning, the role of concepts, and the importance of geographical enquiry in planning schemes of work.
Clarifying your own thinking about what you value in relation to an area of learning is a crucial aspect of providing subject leadership. Depending on your level of confidence and expertise your thoughts may be tentative or quite definite at this stage. Your vision will be underpinned by clear 'aims&' that set out what you want geography to do for children in your school. Use these resources to learn more.
In this course we will begin to explore how we are connected to people and places. From our earliest experiences, interactions between people and places combine to form memories that impact on our development and which are part of our life story about who we are. Early significant experiences can be long lasting into adulthood. Sharing stories about places that have special significance for us can be a powerful way to empathise with others' experiences as well as helping us to understand who we are and how we relate to the world around us.
These books deal with an ever changing environment and in the case of Belonging and Window, show the changes as seen by a child then an adult over a lifetime. These two book covers show the state of the view at the beginning and the end of the story on the front and back covers respectively. In the case of Window the changes are the usurpation of the countryside by urban features. In the case of Belonging the changes show the regeneration of an inner city area.
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has told MPs that schools should not shy away from promoting ‘fundamental British values’ to their pupils (15 October 2014). Ofsted reports highlight how geography can make a significant contribution towards citizenship. Here we provide some useful information about what Ofsted require and how geography can support and promote British values and some relevant GA resources. More information: http://geography.org.uk/news/britishvaluesandgeography/
One of the key areas that you will need to think about is what you value about geography's contribution to learning and what vision you hold for primary geography in your school.
Having a &'vision&'; for what geography can do for your children is the key to being a subject leader rather than simply a manager. It enables you to shape and design the kind of curriculum that is right for your school and for the children you teach. Furthermore, your collective 'vision&' and &';aims' for the curriculum provide you with the tools to monitor how effectively the subject is being taught.
Young children love Barnaby, and his appearance in unfamiliar places and environments helps children to relate to them. Seeing their own Barnaby in the classroom, and then seeing pictures of his adventures in faraway places helps children bridge the gap between the immediate, familiar environment and abstract, unfamiliar environments. This page on the GA website provides links to various Barnaby Bear resources, including books, puppet, websites and social media.
These resources on the Geographical Association website contain high quality images that can be used in the classroom at all levels to stimulate enquiry among your students into a variety of human and physical geographical topics, including resource management, landforms and processes, people and place, hazards and risk, and global development.
With the appropriate guidance, these images could potentially be used with any age group. Each photo is accompanied by a description and further useful information. Three countries are represented: China, Kenya and South Africa.
Most of the photos were taken by GA volunteers during GA Study Tours, and are copyright free.
The suggested activities outlined in the following pages aim to inspire students to appreciate the range of opportunities, views and issues that surround this important element of geography learning; looking at geography’s contribution to real life problems and issues and how geography benefits from other subject disciplines.
The title 'Fantastic Geographies&' is deliberately constructed to both acknowledge the notion of different ways of knowing the world and to capture the potential of theoretical developments in the discipline to enthuse, engage and fascinate school students. This Think Piece, based on a small research study with University of Nottingham PGCE geography students, describes how beginning teachers can be encouraged to explore the nature of geographical knowledge, consider its impact for teaching and learning, and reconceptualise the notion of pedagogical content knowledge.
