Secondary Geography in Action

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I’m delighted that today marks a month since my contribution to the Sherrington/Hachette series Secondary Geography in Action was published. I have been thrilled to see it in different places and teachers getting their copies.

One of the great privileges and challenges of the work that I do in teacher education is to recognise the diversity of the subjects community and how it compares to Geography as a discipline. I don’t think I had the time and headspace to understand that whilst I was in schools!

Some subjects have very different day to day experiences, support and literature – or limited access to subject associations and partners – whilst others have incredibly strong networks to draw upon.

Some subjects are dominated by hierarchical knowledge and commonly agreed conceptual frameworks – where almost every school in the country will teach the same material in the same order, and probably in the same way. Others have a contested and constructed curriculum, where each context will make deliberate decisions about what’s right for them and in what sequence.

So, in writing the book, I wanted to acknowledge the huge legacy of brilliant work that has gone before in our subject and community. We have a powerful literature and evidence-informed thinking across the range of our discipline, and some brilliant work and writers who have investigated key areas of it in depth. That’s why you’ll see lots of references and “recommended reads” in SGIA – a constant reminder of the awesome landscape we sit in.

I’m also hugely mindful of the variety and choices that geography teachers make all the time. Whether we’re picking topics, sequences, case studies or examples, or responding in the moment to the changing and challenging context we face in local and national landscapes, we are iterating and making decisions that serve the best interests of our students. I have a limited view on this, and I don’t have all the answers – which is why I’ve been delighted to invite contributions and conversations from others, and why I I hope I don’t make too many declarative statements! I talk about this in the ‘debates’ chapter, and explore some of the issues that I think we face at critical moments ahead of the Curriculum Review in our subject.

I hope the book offers a handy overview of the terrain we occupy – and gives you confidence to go off in different directions and find the paths that you need to. I hope that it does justice to the incredible authors, thinkers, contributors and communities of practice that I’ve benefited from over my career. I hope it’s been useful and practical – I’d love to hear feedback, or for you to share what you’re taking away from it, or write a review to support others.

Most of all, I hope it helps move you towards action in a way that supports, encourages and promotes wellbeing and sustainable teaching careers in geography. I hope it gives you inspiration and confidence in the decisions you are able to make as a geography teacher, and how you can make a difference to your students understanding of our subject and our world!

On travelling or tourism… musings from a holiday by a(n old) Geographer

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There are moments in one’s life where you suddenly feel your age. They might be physical or practical, or they might be anniversaries or opportunities. I had one when I was on the way to the Geographical Association Conference last Easter, and realised that my waterproof jacket was older than some of my trainees.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to do some travelling, and noticed a rise in two different trends that make me feel really old and out of touch. Rather than accepting that reality, I wanted to reflect on what we could possibly learn from it for Geography and geography teaching. Obviously.

Highlights or the whole story – whose geographies are we teaching? Tourist or traveller?

First, there’s a sense of seeing the “highlights” becoming the whole story. In some museums and galleries, there’s clearly too much for people to see in a single time – and it’s understandable that people produce guides for “highlights” of the collection.

I have seen many examples of this becoming the only story that’s being told to and by tourists. There are people clearly going between only the publicized ‘highlight’ exhibits, and not looking at anything else. In the Louvre, the queues were 10-20 people deep for the Mona Lisa, but several other da Vinci paintings in the Grand Gallery were almost ignored. The Venus di Milo had tens of people queuing to take the ‘classic photo’ from the front, but the sides and wider space of the statue were empty. In the Vatican Museum, the density of people in the Sistine Chapel and the clusters of people around particular sites meant that the sanctity and peace of the space was ruined.

And I get it. I accept that I am an old person now, and I prefer space and peace and quiet to chaos and busy-ness. I understand that we don’t have infinite time, and we can’t spend hours learning about everything to view all umpteen thousand items in a gallery or a place, even if we might perhaps want to. “Tourism” may mean a superficial and quick whip round some of the key points – and people don’t want to be immersed in learning and cultural perspectives.

I think we have perhaps become more alive to the risks of this in our geography lessons. We spend more time thinking about the multiple geographies we could teach, considering the stake holders and whether we’d represent their views fairly, and we are alert to the risks of the ‘single story’ narrative and the ‘highlights reel’ approach to case studies and places. We try not to be “case study tourists” and hope to take a traveller’s approach instead – journeying along some of the pieces alongside the geographies we are representing, and having authentic experiences in how we do that geography.

The “photographer’s gaze” – what are we saying about ourselves?

I am no stranger to taking photographs on holiday, and every now and then, I’ll even include ones of my wife and I in them. I think we all do that, to a greater or lesser extent – it’s important to us to make a memory and capture something about where we’ve seen, or a moment we shared.

More recently, though, I’ve seen the photograph become the objective – not the memory, the place or the moment. In a number of different places in a recent trip, I saw groups of friends spending significant time photographing each other, whilst dressed in formal wear, or with immaculate designer make up and approaches. They weren’t really paying attention to the place other than as a background. There’s a possibility that they were photography or art students, of course, and I’m certainly not saying that they are doing something “wrong”: people are free to travel and explore the world however they want.

But by objectifying this process in this way, they’re making the experience about what it says about them, rather than what it says about the place they are visiting. “Look how beautiful I looked in this place”, or even “look how cultured I am by visiting this place” is a different statement to “Look how beautiful this place is, and I was so excited to be there”. They are putting themselves at the heart of the narrative, and focusing on what other people see about them in doing so. They are potentially visiting places for “the gram” photo, rather than for the experience.

(I completely acknowledge the hypocrisy and double standards here, by the way. I’m self-indulgently writing a blog post about this, and name-dropping a bunch of places I’ve been, to make a tangential point about Geography positionality and how educated, culture, self-aware or thoughtful I am. The fact that I know and acknowledge this doesn’t change it as a truth…)

For me, this is perhaps a more interesting space to explore in terms of representation and whose geography we teach. How do we explore authentically and honestly, without making a big show of “look at us looking at this – how X are we?” – for whatever values of X you may want to judge your curriculum thinking. Are we looking at things to be seen looking? Are we exploring issues of diversity, inclusion and representative geography because they have something fascinating and geographical to tell us, or are we running a risk of doing so in a performative manner?

We can also explore it in terms of the expected narrative conversations. How often do we pre-judge the place we are exploring, in order to tell a pre-conceived conclusion and story? There’s a narrative difference between “Here’s our case study of how HICs do better on hazard management” by comparison to “here’s an example from X Case Study – what is interesting and what do we learn about it?”. Are we truly travelling to those places and spaces, or are we just giving snippets of highlights that we want to massage in to the story archive that we are telling?

So, how are we travelling and exploring our world?

I am keen to think about what this way of seeing the tourists teaches us about the way we might see our geography teaching.

  • Are we showing people a view that tells them about us, or confirms a pre-existing narrative only?
  • Are we visiting the highlights of a place, or taking a more leisurely journey to explore it in detail?
  • How do we become genuine travellers, rather than just potentially tourists ‘for the gram’?

Is twenty plenty? The place of “older” case studies in a Geography curriculum

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As a recent BBC News article has highlighted – and somewhat to my shock and disappointment – it is twenty years to the day that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. For a while, it felt like one of the most taught case studies in the Geography curriculum – partly because of the raw impacts on a highly prepared country, but also because of the variety of imagery, resources and outcomes that we could talk about, use and evaluate.

Since then, there have been many more hurricanes in the US, plenty of typhoons and mega storms elsewhere, and a number of innovations, iterations and examples that have replaced Katrina as a case study example de jure.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I am not advocating for the teaching of Katrina as the sole example of the impacts, prediction or preparation of a tropical revolving storm – that would be what Steve Brace described as ‘a zombie case study’.

But I don’t think they should be stricken entirely from the record, and that we should only be able to teach things from “within the students’ lifetime” or within a fixed number of years either. Here’s why I think the older case studies still have some place in our teaching:

  • Similar events haven’t occurred that recently. Here’s a challenge. Try to think of an explosive volcanic eruption that caused significant impact in a higher-income country. We’ve got effusive Iceland over the years, and a few examples from Etna which were less serious and smaller scale. We could point to the 2019 White Island eruption, but despite the impact and fatalities, that is a relatively small volcanic event. So if we want to compare, we’re going to have to go back in time to something like Mt. St. Helens…
  • There are unique or specific features of them that we want to draw out. A number of events have unique geography that doesn’t occur any other time – and perhaps this is something we want to highlight to add flair, demonstrate sophisticated response, or even just show the complexity and nuance of management challenges!
  • There’s a particular connection to our community and context. Weirdly, when I taught at an SE London school, we had a Deputy Head who was originally from Texas, and had been working in New Orleans during Katrina. Being able to hear first-hand about what it was like, and ask questions of a ‘real life case study’ was far more compelling than a video or textbook example.
  • The evolution of the case study is significant. For example, it wasn’t until 5-10 years after the Haiti earthquake that we learned the true horrors and scale of some of the abuse of power of international NGOs. That’s an important story. If we only teach the things that are within the first 6-18 months, we might miss long-term impacts, or some of the human issues that we should be thinking about and teaching about.

For me, though, I think the biggest reason to be teaching about case studies like Katrina is that they build a richness and depth to our geographical understanding and stories of place. Humans are constantly adapting and evolving their management, approaches, and strategies for the challenges that we face.

I think we owe it to our students to be able to show the way we’ve developed through time – rather than just a snapshot of a single moment. When I taught earthquake management, I’d explain the theory of what was possible, and outline the steps that highly-prepared nations had taken to get there. We’d talk about how the issues that we exposed in the Kobe case study were solved by these strategies or those investment priorities, and then we iterated that a step further in the Sendai example with this law, or adjusting the focus to defend against that secondary impact. We talked about earthquake management as an ongoing evolution of learning, adapting and building more robust systems. We’d evaluate whether countries were choosing to get better and what made it possible for them to evolve – rather than being stuck in a single moment or strategy because that was where it ranked in their domestic priorities. And we’d talk about the complexity and challenge of what “management” meant, and how we kept learning more.

Talking about Katrina, and reflecting on what’s changed in the last twenty years, may well represent an “old case study” that could be updated – but for me, the richness of the conversation and the discussion is a key part of how we do great geography, even if it makes me feel very old.

We need to invite students to be part of the palimpsest of constantly shifting and constructed conversations about what works and how we do better, and to draw on the history of times when we didn’t get it so right. And so, to me, it’s what makes a great disciplinary approach to a case study – to be able to site it in the human, physical and historical landscape that it deserves to be.