YOUNG PEOPLE'S GEOGRAPHIES
A project funded by the Action Plan for Geography
I am involved in this project, which started in November 2006
First Project meeting - November 2006
Second Project meeting - January 2007
Third Project meeting - March 2007
Fourth Project Meeting - July 2007
Met up at the New Walks Museum, Leicester - early start from KL, and through some traffic on the A17 - parked up in Peterborough and then train to Leicester via Stamford, Oakham and Melton Mowbray, then a quick 5 minute walk to the museum - some lovely autumnal colours on the trees, and into nice venue, a wander through some of the galleries.
Introduction by Mary Biddulph of Nottingham University. Needed to consider the ideas of CONVERSATIONS: aim of project to promote conversations between different members of the geography community to help people engage with developments in Geography in ways that will hopefully lead to a new process of 'curriculum making' and the development of more relevant and motivating learning experiences for young people through geography."
Tracey Skelton
"Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures" (Routledge, 1998)
Conversations: dealing with perceptions of pupils. So far, academic geographers have had the conversation, now geography teachers and pupils come next...
Aims
Finding out first what we are going to do, and then developing pedagogies. Establishing conversations between different groups of people
Tracey Skelton: Dept of Geog. Loughborough University
Social justice - inequalities, disparities of wealth - awareness and change...
Complexity of small places: worked in Montserrat -
Identity - how do people decide who they are ?
Cultural turn has influenced human geography
Awareness and links to academic work...
Helen Griffiths - PhD student
5 picturesque and 5 un-picturesque landscapes
Impact of song lyrics, games, film, media - journalists expressing children's views rather than children themselves
Issues of School geographies: what are our experiences of the subject - why do people continue to take it - why did Geography matter ?
Space for reflection ?
Geog as a 'white middle class subject'
What would a curriculum look like ? New approaches to teaching school Geography... (link to Pilot GCSE)
Local connections can be a spark to exploring other connections.
Useful quotes
"Childhood has always been a disputed territory, its true geography quickly forgotten as we grow older, replaced by an adult-imagined universe." (Libby Brooks, 2006)
"The rational can only ever approximate the experiential.." (Anoop Nayak, 2003)
Ethical Issues associated with researching YPG
Tracey Skelton
Who are they working with ? Peer group or other age groups ? University researchers have to go through ethics committee.
Importance of protection: tensions and contradictions. Confidentiality.
Young people not neutral - ethics can help students to consider responsibility - cross over with Citizenship / PSHE
Who is the research for ? Who will benefit ? Who gains the most ? Positive and negative outcomes...
Success criteria: no-one should wish that they hadn't participated - how can people be thanked for their time ?
Young people want to be named - anonymity issues & the right to say no...
Parents may not agree, despite child wanting to: Commission on the Rights of the Child Articles 12 and 13 are in conflict with this.
Helen Griffiths
Spoke about a project "Making a Connection" involving consumer products...
Classroom organisation - desks in groups and how to speak to the groups. Standing behind pupils rather than at front of class.
Different ways of expressing things. Different approaches for students to express themselves. Implications for People as Consumers.
Issues for teachers: groups might appear to be "ordered chaos" and some tensions...
John Morgan
Futurelab - Bristol schools research project - funded by Microsoft - educational innovation...
"Enquiring Minds"
Cultural turn - late 80s - change in society. Doreen Massey / David Harvey - Geography went to the 'left' - location models didn't work & Peter Jackson: "Thinking Geographically"
"Teaching geography of the 1960s to children born in the 1990s"
Willis survey - why do working class children end up in working class jobs ?
Content of curriculum left to teachers and lost relevance to communities - marginalisation of discussion and then centralised National Curriculum
Whose voices are we trying to get into classrooms ?
Changing Curriculum - what would schools look like if they started from the needs of pupils ?
Aims: Students to be independent, to take responsibility for their own learning, create their own knowledge and conduct their own research.
Mapping the Curriculum - focus has tended to be NC - stops people doing other things...
QCA Futures project
Pedagogies: Critical literacy, multiple intelligences, accelerated learning, thinking skills....
Personalisation and Creativity are now on the agenda...
What's missing from this are children's cultures...
Collapsed days with enquiries.
6 weeks of lessons: "Listening to Children". Allowed students to make visible aspects of their daily lives. Data generated led on to negotiation on how to link this to the curriculum. Teachers modelling the process of enquiry. Children "tooled up" with the critical skills to develop their own 'socialised' enquiry (students decided between them what to study)
Syllabus: looking at the operations of lessons: analogies: prison, football etc.
Beat the Teacher: things that teachers didn't know but pupils did...
Presentation: What's hot and what's not !! Photographic A-Z of school. Annotating map. Responding to world events.
Classroom environment. Trust. Sharing. Responsibility. "It's always nice to...." "I would like it if...."
Loss of security of subject knowledge - is it really that interesting ? Don't people want to escape the everyday ?
Use of time, space, resources and language.
Need to change all of those aspects...
ISSUES
Who do we invite along ?
Paperwork: Risk assessment / travel arrangements / permission forms / contacting parents & consent form (also for the videoing of the students)
4 students to identify - various signatures - research contract - agreement on what to do... (attend all 3 days of the project...)
Eleanor Rawling: "Dangers of centrally managed creativity" - if serious about this, would remove league tables which constrain creativity...
Which groups to involve and implications ?
IDEAS FOR KES...
What to do between now and the next session...
Mary Biddulph introduced PM session....
Need to consider a particular focus for our work....
NOVEMBER 2006
We needed to choose 4 students to represent KES and decided to set a task to identify those people who had some good ideas.
You can now download the TASK (WORD document)
As a result of this we identified 4 students who came along to the.....
Don't forget to download the APG booklet and get on a course !
www.geography.org.uk/download/GA_APGEventsBooklet.pdf
January 2007
The day of the meeting coincided with another of the depressions which has been passing over the UK recently. It was a stormy trip across to Peterborough, with the minibus door threatening to open, and trying to find a parking space at the railway station - plus two lots of roadworks. The train was delayed a little, and we had an eventful journey back, but we arrived by about 10am, and had a coffee. Here was the running order of the day.
9.30-10.00 Introduction
10-00-11.00 Session 1 Fieldwork (Academics, teachers shadow)
11.00-11.15 Coffee
11.15-12.30 Session 2 Connecting conversations
12.30-1.15 Lunch
1.15-2.00 Session 3 Why is this geography? How do we research our personal geographies?
2.00-2.45 Plenary: guidance set of questions around YPGs, enquiry and curriculum making. School groups (pupils–teachers in conversation)
Introduction
Mary Biddulph and Roger Firth introduced first session with some images of the city centre of Leicester, and explained how the first stage of the project would be to look at unfamiliar places and the students' response to them. This was an idea that was familiar to our students as they do the Pilot GCSE. Similar idea to MY PLACE.
First Session
We were accompanied by the "video man" and also Nick Hopwood, the evaluator for the project. A trip along a circular route from the New Walk Museum into the city centre, via King St. & Market St. & past the Civic Offices. Into St. Martin's Square past a good old fashioned sweet shop with sweet jars of "Yorksire Mixture' (sic)
Second Session
Group came back to the museum and produced a poster to try to capture the experience.
Produced a poster with diagrams, text, post-it notes etc.
Stallholder stayed with the poster and then had to explain it to visitors...
How have you looked at this place ?
Safety
Clean
Old and New
Thinking about places, and how that might change over time...
We mentioned the Gordon Ramsay visit to King's Lynn and the way that the town was shown.
Lunch
Groups
Discussing approaches to the project and WHY IS THIS GEOGRAPHY ? Each group had 1 representative from each school, and discussed their views so far with a University lecturer or researcher. They had a discussion on the nature of place, and their personal experiences. Listened in on the discussions with: Tracey Skelton
Tracey is one of the authors of an excellent and useful book which is pictured below: COOL PLACES. If you search on Amazon you will find that you can look at some of the contents of the book, and read the first section which will give you a flavour for its usefulness. Thanks also to Tracey for getting me a copy at a discount price...
Then back in school groups to discuss our thoughts.
Some IDEAS that the students came up with are on the PROJECT page. This will develop over the next few months.
March 15th 2007
We will be joined at this meeting by Dan Raven Ellison and students from Langtree School, Reading
9.00 Arrival and Coffee
9.30 - 10.00 The YPG Project Story …so far
10-00 - 11.15 Session 1- Sharing school curriculum stories
11.15 - 11.30 Coffee
11.30 - 12.30 Session 2 - Connecting with others
12.30 - 1.15 Lunch
1.15 - 2.00 Session 3 - Curriculum connections
2.00 - 2.45 Plenary: What could this mean for our school ? School groups (pupils-teachers in conversation)
We are working towards producing a CURRICULUM UNIT.
A curriculum unit is a coherent sequence of lessons / learning experiences that addresses a clear curriculum goal. The goal will often be focused by a sequence of key questions, and a range of intermediate learning objectives, ranging over geographical knowledge, understanding and skills, or “geographical thinking” The unit could show a sequence of lesson plans (you can use your school’s preferred format, or we have created a medium term planning framework that you are welcome to use - attached) Your curriculum planning unit may be expressed in terms of a clear narrative or account that takes us through the teaching.
In addition to the overarching goal, your curriculum unit will show the:
Students had a series of conversations. Talked through the progress so far. Used the sheet with the big concepts in Geography and related this to what they had done. Also used an image from a PRIMARY resource to explore the ideas of scale and what geography was contained within a particular context or image.
Dan Raven Ellison showed a video produced by him and students from Langtree School, Berkshire, who visited a school in Ghana in January 2007
The students then fed back to the other students, and had a conversation with academics. Some of them were looking at issues of CONSUMPTION.
Comic Relief - JOIN UP campaign - importance of education.
Discussion with academics from various universities.
Discussion about shoes and keys, about space and place, about places for young people and geographies of consumption.
Plenary. Discussion between KES pupils and teachers....
Curriculum Unit
Ideally this should cover about 3 weeks of teaching time.
Idea of KES pupils was to have a GLOBAL WARMING week and target every year group.
We will work on this between now and July.
Another very long and tiring day - thanks once again to the KES students.
FOURTH PROJECT MEETING - July 2007
A change of venue for this meeting: the RAMADA JARVIS hotel in Leicester. Another early start, and AMT coffee and brownie to wake me up on Peterborough platform. The car park was actually emptier than we'd seen it yet. Small train this time - not the luxury we had on the second trip. A different venue, but very convenient for the station.
We had time to set up, and then listening to the other schools' contributions
Listened to presentations from other groups: projects on:
Then used the idea from the Atlas of Experience.
Used Dan Raven Ellison's THINKING SPACE resource.
ORDER YOURS NOW BY CLICKING THE BUTTON BELOW...
Go on, click the button !
Final session
Helen Griffiths, Ian Cook and Tracey Skelton gave their perspectives on the progress that they had seen, particularly how the confidence of some of the students had developed. Helen Griffiths said it was good to see students studying up to date concepts and contexts.
Case studies same that older brothers and sisters had done years before.
Plenary
David Lambert - showed "Shift Happens" presentation that is available on Slideshare
Year 10 pupils were then involved in lessons with Year 8 pupils.
Final thanks to all involved, then went to get the train for the 3 hour ish journey home... the only downside of being based in Leicester