Geography Teaching Today

Environmental Interaction and Sustainable Development

Acceptance of the dynamic interrelationships between physical and human accounts of the world is central to school geography, the distinctive power of the subject lies in the realisation that 'making sense of the world' is often enhanced by a synthesis of perspectives and understanding across at least three areas of concern

• Social fairness and justice - driving the welfare geographers' question of 'who gets what, where and why (and why care?)'.
• Economic prosperity - fuelling interest in how cities, regions or nations work. What jobs do people do, how do they make a living and how can this be secured?
• Environmental quality - stimulating enquiry into how to conserve resources and landscape and ultimately how to militate against large scale environmental damage (e.g. through industrial pollution, soil erosion or over fishing), including global climate change.

The interaction of these fundamental motivations provides the basis for geographical study of 'the environment'. Thus, geographical perspectives are central to understanding 'sustainable development'.

Everyday Geography

On a day-to-day basis young people participate in their own 'lived' or 'everyday' geographies. They live somewhere, shop here, hang out there, have friends who live over there, have relatives that come from elsewhere, holiday in some locations, and have perceptions of 'other' people and places. Geography in school can both draw from these experiences and help young people understand them, connecting them to the wider world of people, places and the human and physical processes that operate through space.

Interdependence

The concept of interdependence is important because of geography's concern to develop 'holistic' understanding. Geographical enquiry often sets out specifically to seek out and understand links between phenomena, for example, human action in one place can have consequences in another place (e.g. deforestation causing flooding; migration of human populations) or political decisions having diverse effects in different places (e.g. enlargement of the EU resulting in large scale movement of people and other flows)

A feature of some geographical studies is the use of 'systems approaches' - perhaps the most familiar being the hydrological cycle. Such approaches enable us to be explicit about links and dependencies throughout a process.

Key Concepts

Planning with 'key concepts' in mind (rather than delivering prescribed content) provides a great opportunity. We can select the content - themes, topic or issues - to suit the interest of the students. Some of them, like international migration or global climate change are major issues of the day. What links the content together is how we are encouraged to 'think geographically' about it - by growing young people's understanding of some big, useful ideas.

For the revised Key Stage 3 these are as follows:

Place
Space
Scale
Interdependence
Physical and Human Processes
Environmental Interaction and Sustainable Development
Cultural Understanding and Diversity

These big ideas are not fixed and are notoriously difficult to pin down (they are, after all, big!). But the glossary may prove useful for planning purposes.

Levels

The national curriculum programme of study is anchored by the Level Descriptions that purport to show progress. There is great confusion over their use - and the GA feels they are often misused. They are difficult to use in any way other than for the purpose they were designed - as fairly rough descriptions to be used to help judge pupil progress by the end of a Key Stage. The GA has a position paper on this - www.geography.org.uk/secondary/#levels.

Living Geography

See www.geography.org.uk/projects/livinggeography

LOtC

The Learning Outside the Classroom initiative follows the November 2006 launch of the Outdoor Learning Manifesto, and provides a great potential boost to geography teachers wanting the use the real world.

Watch out for developments in terms of CPD in relation to the Learning Outside the Classroom initiatives.

(See Living Geography)