my podcast - ventriloquy - is exactly one year old, today :-)
Dr Margaret Robertson, of La Trobe University, gave me a special birthday treat this morning. She actually read aloud my blog entry dated 22 March 2006, as a prelude to her keynote address, which was entitled 'The ruling classes of geographical education: facing multiple perspectives and dilemmas'!
wow! i was absolutely floored by this compliment.
thank you very much, Dr Robertson :-) i have truly been encouraged and inspired by you.
Dr Robertson gave us many things to think about in her keynote address. in particular, she drew attention to David Harvey's writings lending a Marxist perspective on the relationships between space and place. Harvey reminds our consumerist society that issues of identity, space and place are in fact inextricably bound to our socially-constructed cultures. His quotation from 1996 - "who are we and to what space / place do we belong? am i a citizen of the world, the nation, the locality?" (p.246) - find its modern translation in Peter Jackson's and Margaret Roberts's conception of 'zooming in and out of scales', which, in turn, inform my developing thoughts on what i've termed the 'quantum classroom®' (in which learners and teachers operate concurrently across various scales of time and place).
(as things turned out, Harvey's quotation also turned up in Peter Bond's paper - described below. Peter used Morgan's (2006) work to illustrate how Harvey's questions might so well be answered by the infusion of citizenship education in geography.)
the protagonists in a quantum classroom® would likely operate within what Sassen (2005) has termed 'countergeographies'. defined as "types of spaces where we can find resistance to global power and as-yet-unrecognised forms of participation by actors typically represented as powerless, or victims, or uninvolved with global conditions" (p.155), countergeographies challenge us to rethink what we mean by local actors working at local scales. Dr Robertson elaborates: "the 'local' is no longer part of a neatly nested set of hierarchies. Local spaces can themselves cross borders to all levels and provide access to informal and formal economies. Children grow up with these possibilities".
they do indeed, and teachers ignore that to their peril.
Dr Robertson also introduced the idea of the 'new empiricism', by which she refers to a shift away from "theory grounded in 'known' principles to a search for new meanings through new ways of operating for communities of learners on a global scale". this resonated strongly with me because my own doctoral research has, unbeknownst to me, addressed none other than Dewey's (1916) call to teachers to look to the everyday lives of children and to seek ways to bring these experiences into the classroom (see also Downs and Stea (1974). As Dr Robertson expresses it, "mind maps provide a tool for learning about the lived experiences of people and help us to reconstruct students' 'worlds'".
one of the paper presentations i attended this morning was by Trond Petter Harstad and Per Jarle Saetre. Trond teaches in a Norwegian school, while Per works at the Sogn og Fjordane University College. their paper was entitled 'Simulation of conflicts in a local society'. they described how they conducted a role play with 23 seventeen- to eighteen-year-olds, as part of their geography and civics class. the scenario given to the pupils was that a chemical plant was to be built in a rural part of the country.
i've used role play in my own classes, and it was interesting to me to learn that Trond and Per designed their activity to include a role for 'the press'. it was also shared that during the debriefing session, time was given for the learners to explicitly step outside of their respective roles, and the suggestion was made to even invite a guest (who would represent one of the real-life interest groups) to be present.
as already briefly mentioned above, another very interesting presentation this morning was given by Dr Peter Bond, of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Peter is not a geographer by training, and his paper - entitled 'The geography of loyalty: a new challenge for educators' - would be especially helpful in my social studies classes. i was introduced to the useful quotation from Aristotle, that "the nature of citizenship ... is a question that is often disputed: there is no general agreement on a single definition".
Peter went on to trace the roots of the justifications for citizenship education back to Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, John Stuart Miles and Dewey. not surprisingly, such justifications are legion, and include national unity, socio-cultural heritage, core / shared values, the common good, the civic deficit, rights and responsibilities, and the maintenance of a democracy. Peter elaborated that this notion of 'geographies of loyalty' could be applied as equally to the activities of transnational companies, as to transnational terrorism. he argued that citizenship education, which has traditionally comprised dimensions of participatory scale, educational objectives, and the elements of citizenship themselves, ignore the issue of ethnicity and community-cultures to its own peril.
in the afternoon, Peter's colleagues at the QUT - Dr Iraphne Childs and Dr Peter Hastings - talked about 'Student perceptions of geography in their university studies at the QUT'. one of the more interesting takeaways for me was that while, on the one hand, 'world regions' was the most well-subscribed unit offered by the pair, 'Australian geography studies' was consistently the least popular.
i wonder why, especially in the light of a paper by Professor Manuela Malheiro Ferreira - who teaches at the Universidade Aberta in Portugal - in which she described how the Lisbon residents in her research group lacked knowledge of their local area. Professor Manuela's paper was entitled 'Sustainable urban development: the role of citizens'.
Dr Graham Butt, from the University of Birmingham, talked about the tensions between what might be considered to be of academic value, as opposed to what might be valued in the classroom, in his talk 'How should we determine quality in research in geography education?' he put forward the work of Furlong and Oancea (2005) as a more holistic and rounded framework for such evaluations, along the dimensions of epistemiology, technology, capacity building / value for people, and economy.
another presentation i attended in the afternoon was by Margaret Roberts, of the University of Sheffield. her paper was entitled 'Shaping students' understanding of the world in the geography classroom'. Margaret issued a timely reminder of the often insidious role played by tools as innocuous as maps, case studies and textbooks, on just how children think of the world.
finally, Eleanor Rawling from Oxford talked on 'A 'cultural turn' in school geography? The experience of one pilot course for 14-16 year olds in England'. once again, there are remarkable parallels between the work described (this time, by the pupils of the Deepings School in Peterborough), and my own research intervention. once again, the concept of the quantum classroom® was implicitly raised, this time in her paraphrasing of Phil Crang's (2000) definition of a cultural turn as "a complex and varied set of changes in the approaches taken by human geographers, in the disciplinary overlaps, and in their resources". Eleanor sees in these changes in approach, the idea of operating (often concurrently) at multiple scales.
when i first started this blog three years' ago, i was still sceptical about whether it would be worth my time and effort. today, i can't imagine not blogging. voyeurism the blog, and likewise ventriloquy the podcast, have been invaluable tools for me in my continuing journey as a learner and teacher.
indeed, i would not have guessed that when i uploaded that first mp3 file, i would be celebrating the anniversary of the podcast no fewer than fifty-seven episodes later :-)
considering that i'm a self-declared geek, i've been a relatively late starter in blogging in general, and in podcasting in particular. it took me a while before i convince myself last year to, at the very least, give producing my own podcast a go, in order to explore whether there really was merit in the idea of subscribable multimedia content.
looking back these past twelve months, it turns out that that idea was a no-brainer, and my only 'regret' (if that is indeed what it is) is that i might have started earlier. producing ventriloquy has not only been addictive, but it has also introduced me to the power of podcasts as pedagogical tools.
it's a power that i'm still in the early stages of exploring and documenting, and i'll be sharing my nebulous thoughts in tomorrow's paper presentation at the IGU-CGE symposium.
ventriloquy has been a success because you - my listeners, viewers and subscribers - have made it so. i know i've thanked you in the past, but i truly mean it when i express again my gratitude for your support.
to God be the glory!
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