New stuff for 2007
Global inequality is a key theme at GCSE. It is ever increasing apparently, despite the best efforts of aid agencies to educate us on the extent to which we overuse resources, and can change lives with a small monthly donation. The greatest extent of this is at the extreme ends of the 'richness' and 'poorness' scale. Quality of life considers the ways in which people live their day to day lives. It doesn't mean the same as 'standard of living', and doesn't just relate to wealth or earnings. Education for example is a key factor which people sometime forget, although gratifyingly it does come up when students are asked.
Bill Gates, Helen Walton and Warren Buffet: the world's 3 richest people, have the same personal wealth (or at least they did before the recent stock market falls) as the poorest 48 countries.
One key indicator is GNP per capita: GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT.
Quality of Life is not all rosy in the UK. The books of Nick Danziger and Nick Cohn paint a rather less than optimistic picture of life for many people. Each town has its 'notorious' estates or areas.
Quality of Life is shown up by the Census returns. It is also revealed by the annual report from National Statistics. Other organisations include the Guinness 'Top Towns' survey.
A recent discovery is the IDLER's site, which is advertising a book out in October 2003. Here's the cover....
The book is the result of an INTERNET search which allows people to e-mail in their recommendations for er...crap towns. The site does features some rude words, so you may not want to recommend it to students, but on the other hand, I'm sure they'll have seen the words before. There's no recommendations for King's Lynn. There is also a second edition of the book, and you can read many of the entries on the Idler site if you want to save some cash.
If you're doing a project on a city, you could search through first and if necessary edit the entries. Some of them are very amusing, and there are some obvious candidates based on personal experience of living in some fairly dodgy places over the years.
How about the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford ? Or Peterborough.
The follow up to this is on the BBC site: HULL was named the worst place in the UK to live. Check out the nominations of other people for a bit of alternative urban Geography.
Also have some resources and a mystery based around this now to explore the reasons why HULL might have been named the worst place to live - looks at quality of life.
There are a series of countries around the Pacific Rim which have spent the last 50 years or so catching up rapidly with other MEDC's. By putting a large effort into developing their manufacturing industry, particularly in the area of consumer electronics such as video and musical equipment, and mobile phones.
The Pacific Rim includes those countries which border the coast of the Pacific Ocean, particularly those in SE Asia. Michael Palin did a trip around the area in a series which features on his website: PALIN's TRAVELS.
The NIC's are also known as the TIGER ECONOMIES. The 4 Tigers are those which are particularly ferocious and will take on all comers if necessary. In the late 1990's, some of them began to suffer from economic problems.
LESSON PLANS
1. TIGER ECONOMIES
Check out my NIC page.
We use videos from the Channel 4 series: Place and People: Asia Pacific. You may have copies of these videos. If so, you can get information on them from the CHANNEL 4 SITE.
The one on South Korea: 'Microchip miracle', covers Kumi City, and the Samsung factory, plus a small feature on environmental pollution, which has become a consequence of the industrial growth.
They have Aims, a Programme outline, Background, Activities and Links on the programmes in the series.
You should seek out the company website to find out more about their activities.
You need a map centred on the Pacific, so that the Pacific Rim can clearly be seen as a whole.
2. What does this mean to you ?
Does this affect quality of life ?
3. THE GEOGRAPHY OF HAPPINESS PROJECT
An exciting project I was involved in in
2006. This will involve filming in a number of locations around Europe to
evaluate the level of HAPPINESS and compare with the indicators that are used...
Check out the progress HERE on the HAPPY page.