at the annual conference of the UK's Geographical Association today, the association's president - Sue Lomas - posed delegates the following question:
"are teachers making geography a burden on the memory, or a challenge to the mind?"
i think it's an insight which should continually inform our pedagogical approach and decision-making.
she reminded us about David Lambert's distinction of the 'vocabulary' and 'grammar / syntax' of geography - ie, that care should be taken to go beyond the portrayal of geography as the trivial pursuit of discrete facts.
Sue also shared the following quotation from Dewey:
"if we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow".
pithy, but true :-)
Margaret Roberts - the editor of Teaching Geography - talked about enquiry-based approaches to geography in her keynote. she divided her talk into four parts:
- creating a need to know
she talked about the importance of a teacher's Stance (a concept akin to Voice). she gave a list of clever starters which present learners with cognitive conundrums, eg the use of pictures, charts, videos, maps, props (such as a recycling bag), and concept maps. the concept map she showed was particularly interesting, and it was used to open a lesson on the European Union (EU). i felt it could also be applied to lessons on globalization. all her starters had the common strategy of (a) arousing curiosity (b) activating prior knowledge and (c) helping the learners formulate questions;
- learners study the data for themselves
she emphasised that a key concept, often overlooked, at this stage is that of choice. choice can be manifested through choice of research topic, as well as choice of reporting / presentation. she also reminded us that it's helpful to use topical, recent, data (the example she gave was earthquake activity within the last twenty-four hours). another crucial concept was that of affective mapping (such as mapping the feelings of the learners towards the school / neighbourhood);
- making sense of the data
she used frames of inference here. an interesting twist was that she actually inserted the pictorial source into the graphic organiser. she suggested that we use more than one mode of data presentation, and encouraged us to get our learners to critique / compare various modes, depicting similar content. role play is another strategy that could be employed successfully at this stage of the enquiry process. it is important generally for the learners to write and talk about their learning;
- reflecting
this involves both reflecting about what has been learnt, but also metacognition. she emphasised that each strand has at times been neglected. Margaret concluded her excellent talk by suggesting to us to beyond the traditional 5W1H, and to ask questions such as "what ought...?" and "what are the implications...?"
Professor Peter Jackson of Sheffield University gave a lecture on 'thinking geographically'. using the case study of consumer ethics, he suggested that there are four elements to geographical thinking, namely:
- space and place
- scale and connection
- proximity and distance
- relational thinking (vide Margaret Roberts's concept map on the EU)
finally, if you're curious about the title of this post, something that struck me and kept me awake tonight was my observation that almost everyone at the conference was white. it reminded me so much of my days as an undergraduate in Cambridge.
in the context of Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s, i can understand the racial mix at that time. but today? in so-called 'multicultural' Britain?
many speakers today were bemoaning the fact that geography enrolments across the UK are declining.
frankly i'm not surprised, because what seems to me a primary cause is staring at them in the face at their very own conference.
the present proportion of blacks in the UK is approximately five to six percent. that proportion is not reflected among the attendees at this conference. even the four students who shared their experiences during Sue Lomas's opening address were all white.
if the Geographical Association is wondering why geography is an increasingly disenfranchised subject in schools in the UK, they might possibly start by wondering why black geography teachers (of whom i am sure there are many, and doing a good job to boot) are, for whatever reason, absent from a conference which purportedly represents them.
Technorati Tags: education, GA2006, geography, globalization, learning
